I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
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).
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code
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.
But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
/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/
No, it's actually much, much harder unless you are ignoring any of the details, which are the things that actually matter ultimately. When you were first learning did they not do the "tell me how to make a PB+J sandwich" or whatever to show you the imprecision of plain human words? You may comprehend the LLM I/O easily, but you don't know that that matches what's actually happening.
Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.
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.
That's great for you, but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts. For many, many people, the things that are left are not the enjoyable ones. People have built hobbies and careers around doing something they love and its relevance is evaporating at an unprecedented rate.
> but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts.
These posts are about saying "fuck you" to software developers. They're having fun making people scared but really they're just trying to reduce your market value.
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.
Not commenting on the first “who likes” of whether typing out code is enjoyable (because I think that’s inherently personal preference [0]), but I think the second category is to be understood as “things LLMs enable you to do more of”, not things the author is unwilling to do. So actually, you’d agree with them there.
[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'm with you. During most of my career, I was considered very technical and a good coder, but I never really loved the slowness of it. I enjoyed designing solutions but found "putting them into code" tiresome because for me the fun is in actually solving the problem.
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.
Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.
I’m not sure which group you consider worst but LLMs already does both. I can only vouch for Opus 5.5. It just needs someone to tell it to do it that’s all. And I am the most anti AI person this post is targeted to.
> 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.
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?
I think there will be a divide. The SaaS of the future can probably absorb much more LLM use with less knowledgeable devs, because the product not being trash was never critical; it just has to be good enough that Sales can keep convincing people who won't use it to buy it for their orgs. But for things that actually need to be right, there will always be a need for devs who can understand and write code. There has already been some pullback among a few of my colleagues who were riding high earlier this year because what we're working on is more of the second type.
Coding is solving puzzles creatively. When trying to achieve an overall goal, I get some easy problems that remind me how much I've improved since I started out, and some hard problems that are intellectually stimulating. Debugging, reading documentation or source code feels a bit like being a fictional detective running an investigation; plus I'm not just improving my understanding of the system but connecting with other humans through understanding their intent. And finally, I get to choose which solution to implement and how, therefore expressing myself and my own taste.
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.
I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.
Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code
That's a great idea, I will try that too. The LLMs are so capable, but the slowness annoys me. I always end up working on a few things at once and always doing rounds of reading its output, giving new orders, and going back to Reddit/HN/YouTube while it's doing its thing for the next 5 minutes.
I’ve been experimenting with this idea that I can implement features faster and more accurately than the big model + agent swarm paradigm. I also have been trying this because of what the post brings up when it comes to AI burnout.
For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.
When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.
This is great for personal projects, but at work chances are someone will have completely rewritten/refactored/rearchitected everything I'd built up a good mental model of next time I blinked.
Wow, I had never considered it, but it really seems like a huge benefit that all implementations in the company codebase are now perpetually refactored.
It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:
"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things;
I am ashamed to use them."
I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.
What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
> We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
Same here...
We commit bad decision, then in the next PR, workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it), then in the next PR we have to workaround (aka deal with) the initial bad decision + work around...so on and so forth...
And at any point, manually reviewing the changes becomes impossible because you have to reason about the changes keeping all the workarounds and special cases in your mind...
Yeah same here. I feel like I’ve been promoted and not get to manage my own very efficient team that needs a lot of micromanaging. I’ve seen what other people have made without any experience, but I personally feel like I can get my vision done much, much faster, and like I’m not so encumbered by how long it might take to implement some small feature.
In fairness though I never really enjoyed programming for the sake of it, I was always about what you’re getting at the end.
> It's like half the people have turned off their brain.
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
It’s very clear AI writes great code and will even review it for bugs much better and faster than a human can. With cloud agents like Devin, you can spawn an army of these agents at a moments notice. Teams who figure out how to do this will simply out compete any teams who don’t.
Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.
People are comparing this to tech automating wood work, knitting, baking etc. That comparison is fundamentally flawed.
You still needed to know how to operate those machines. Where to begin, when to do what. Know what’s right and what’s wrong. They are just tools.
Something like claude desktop can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform contrary to popular opinion. These harnesses are getting that good.
Only reason people don’t do that is because they are intimidated. Regular people don’t even understand file systems. As soon as an Apple-like version of claude code exists that intimidation will be gone.
I have been writing code for 14 years now and everything I learned from my failures and successes someone else can get for free. Even newer paradigms these LLM’s can dream up.
Its the democratisation, of that foundation people put so much effort building is what pissed off everyone here. Including myself I’ll admit.
Results of all these years of hard earned knowledge are accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.
I use claude code at work, even for architectural decisions it can iterate small prototypes to validate. I still read code because I am old school but it can replace most people I know.
That’s why I added “Results of” that knowledge in front of it. :)
But to be honest, an llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher who can conjure multiple examples if they ask it what was just written. I have seen people out of my field use terms only someone actively working in it would know.
Most people live without knowing how their cars, fuels, medicine, phones work anyways.
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP.
We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months.
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
OpenAI/Anthropic's marketing here reminds me of the way colonizers will exalt criminal groups in the regions they wish to dominate. Similarly, these AI firms have exalted a caste of lower-performing engineers who have been wreaking havoc with AI spam for the last few years. I'm not worried about losing my job and these people will become scapegoats when the bottom falls out.
Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!
Of course they are, but the quote "LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours" is more true there than in other domains. "Any concept" is the most laughable.
Indeed, the OP's point seems very focused on programmers enjoying programming. And that's a perfectly laudable goal, but obviously this then means that the goal is programmer enjoyment, satisfaction, etc. If the goal is code that allows the user to benefit while also being correct and secure, then that drastically changes the economics and hence potential solutions of what parts of the work should be done by a LLM agent and what parts of the work should be done by a human agent. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants; so what you want from code determines a great deal of how to get there with the greatest benefit and the least cost.
This comment highly resonates with me. I strongly believe coding by hand (defined as an act of writing computer code in some programming language) is moreless obsolete. I.e. my skill to implement dijkstra or quicksort in 10 minutes at 1am in 10 different languages while being hangover/drunk is absolutely worthless now.
Software Engineering itself is more than just coding, the creative (and well engineering) part is still there.
it can not not? moreover, it can totally ruin existing invariants, introduce dead code, falsify tests and sabotage further work by poisoning comments and documentation in a few hours.
So what are people like me, who fall into "some values of no one" supposed to do?
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 why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.
LLMs can produce some incredible bloated and convoluted pieces of code if one isn't careful. Even to the point LLMs become useless. Blindly using these 'powertools' is a recipe for disaster.
We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.
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 bit 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 thus 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.
I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
After programming for 40 years, my brain has many language parsers. But languages and interfaces and classes evolve and it been a huge productivity boost the use LLMs for coding.
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.
Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.
Its a false premise so often repeated. I am really tired. Compilers are ruleset: If you pass it one statement it'll produce the same output all the time. Its easy to verify it works. And if enough people have used it before and found no problems, there probably aren't many. Spoiler: People always find niche bugs.
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.
Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).
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.
I find mostly what I do is think about how to improve the product, what the user wants, and what information the LLM needs and how to get it into the context window.
Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.
I have been programming for 25+ years and the last year has been the most fun because every single useless-for-everyone-but-me idea ... I could spend a few hours on and get it working. Did 30-40 different small projects this year.[1] Mostly used by me (and some by a couple of friends).
I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.
Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.
I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.
---
[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.
I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.
Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.
All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.
I can just have the bot do that crap now.
If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.
Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.
I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.
I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.
You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
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.
/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/
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.
Skill issue.
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.
These posts are about saying "fuck you" to software developers. They're having fun making people scared but really they're just trying to reduce your market value.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It doesn't exist yet, but you could easily create it.
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.
Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code
For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.
When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.
And that's not a criticism, that's what I've come back to myself.
Sounds more like a fantasy than reality...
It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:
"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."
It resonates with me similarly as the post.
A lot of these AI guys seem pretty simple to me...
What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
Same here...
We commit bad decision, then in the next PR, workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it), then in the next PR we have to workaround (aka deal with) the initial bad decision + work around...so on and so forth...
And at any point, manually reviewing the changes becomes impossible because you have to reason about the changes keeping all the workarounds and special cases in your mind...
In fairness though I never really enjoyed programming for the sake of it, I was always about what you’re getting at the end.
The correct response to "I feel I have been promoted (without a corresponding title or pay change)" is to be pissed off, not excited
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.
It's very clear they dont. Maybe they will one day. That day isnt today.
You still needed to know how to operate those machines. Where to begin, when to do what. Know what’s right and what’s wrong. They are just tools.
Something like claude desktop can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform contrary to popular opinion. These harnesses are getting that good.
Only reason people don’t do that is because they are intimidated. Regular people don’t even understand file systems. As soon as an Apple-like version of claude code exists that intimidation will be gone.
I have been writing code for 14 years now and everything I learned from my failures and successes someone else can get for free. Even newer paradigms these LLM’s can dream up.
Its the democratisation, of that foundation people put so much effort building is what pissed off everyone here. Including myself I’ll admit.
Results of all these years of hard earned knowledge are accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.
I use claude code at work, even for architectural decisions it can iterate small prototypes to validate. I still read code because I am old school but it can replace most people I know.
Isn't this like saying "any one can paint now because every one have a camera?"..
But to be honest, an llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher who can conjure multiple examples if they ask it what was just written. I have seen people out of my field use terms only someone actively working in it would know.
Most people live without knowing how their cars, fuels, medicine, phones work anyways.
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP. We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
For tasks you enjoy, write them yourself.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
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.
Thank you.
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.
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 bit 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 thus 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.
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.
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.
I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.
Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.
I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.
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[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.
I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.
Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.
All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.
I can just have the bot do that crap now.
If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.