Comment by agumonkey
21 days ago
I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing.
Outsourcing this to an LLM is similar to an airplane stall .. I just dip mentally. The stress goes away too, since I assume the LLM will get rid of the "problem" but I have no more incentives to think, create, solve anything.
Still blows my mind how different people approach some fields. I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.
I'll push it back against this a little bit. I find any type of deliberative thinking to be a forcing function. I've recently been experimenting with writing very detailed specifications and prompts for an LLM to process. I find that as I go through the details, thoughts will occur to me. Things I hadn't thought about in the design will come to me. This is very much the same phenomenon when I was writing the code by hand. I don't think this is a binary either or. There are many ways to have a forcing function.
I think it's analogous to writing and refining an outline for a paper. If you keep going, you eventually end up at an outline where you can concatenate what are basically sentences together to form paragraphs. This is sort of where you are now, if you spec well you'll get decent results.
I agree, I felt this a bit. The LLM can be a modeling peer in a way. But the phase where it goes to validate / implement is also key to my brain. I need to feel the details.
My think/create/solve focus is on making my agentic coding environment produce high quality code with the least cost. Seems like a technical challenge worth playing with.
It probably helps that I have 40 years of experience with producing code the old ways, including using punch cards in middle school and learning basic on a computer with no persistent storage when I was ten.
I think I've done enough time in the trenches and deserve to play with coding agents without shame.
> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.
people seem to have a inability to predict second and third order effects
the first order effect is "I can sip a latte while the bot does my job for me"... well, great I suppose, while it lasts
but the second order effect is: unless you're in the top 10%, you will now lose your job, permanently
and the third order effect is the economy collapses as it is built on consumer spending
Alternatively, another second order effect is can't sip latte anymore because you're orchestrating 8 bots do the work and you're back to 80%-100% time saturation.
The previous second order effect is more likely. For the one orchestrating 8 bots, 7 others are not needed anymore.
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Exactly this. Even if right now you, bottom level wage earning grunt, get to lighten your workload for a fleeting second, sit back and enjoy the latte it's only but a fleeting second until the capital class tighten the screws.
Most people will get laid off and made redundant and those who remain are going to have to run faster than ever to produce wealth for the capital owners.
Yea, I don’t think that will be the case. Spreadsheets simplified the work of junior finance people who did all the work by hand before. But more people work in finance now than before.
Actually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job.
Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Claude Code, and I feel the urge to create more nowadays!
you have a point.. i'm still confused about how this will affect jobs, markets
in a way a personal project is different from a job duty, here you're exploring, less if no deadline.. at work if I feel the llm is doing everything and I don't really master, i risk my job and my skills rot.
I wonder over the long term how programmers are going to maintain the proficiency to read and edit the code that the LLM produces.
There were always many mediocre engineers around, some of them even with fancy titles like "Senior," "Principal", and CTO.
We have always survived it, so probably we can also survive mediocre coders not reading the code the LLM generates for them because they are unable to see the problems that they were never able to see in their handwritten code.
Honestly it’s not that hard. I already coded less and less as part of my job as I get more senior and just didn’t have time, but I was still easy to do code reviews and fix bugs, sit down and whip out a thousand lines in a power session. Once you learn it doesn’t take much practice to maintain it. A lot of traditional coding is very inefficient. With AI it’s like we’re moving from combustion cars to EVs, the energy efficiency is night and day, for doing the same thing.
That said, the next generation may struggle, but they’ll find their way.
Personally I planned to allocate weekly challenges to stay sharp.
It’s going to be extremely difficult if PR and code reviews do not prune unnecessary functions. From what I’m experiencing now, there’s a lot of additional code that gets generated.
"That's the neat part—you don't." Eventually the workflow will be to use the LLM to interpret the LLM-generated codebase.
I don’t read or edit the code my claude code agent produces. That’s its job now. My job is to organize the process and get things done.
In this case why can’t other agents just automate your job completely ? They are capable of that. What do you bring in the process of still doing manual organization ?
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simonw alert!!!
> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them
These people just drool at being able to have work done for them to begin with. Are you sure it is just "code"?
> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.
In my circles see some overlap with the people who are like: "Done! Let's move on" and don't worry about production bugs, etc. "We'll fix it later".
I've always stressed out about introducing bugs and want to avoid firefighting (even in orgs where that's the way to get noticed).
Too much leaning on coding tools and agents feels to sketchy to someone like me right now (maybe always tbh)
>I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.
+100 for this.
Everything you have said here is completely true, except for "not in that group": the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors letting these tools rip, even despite the drawbacks.
Maybe.
But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt. It kind of strikes me as similar to the hubris of calling the Titanic "unsinkable." It's an untested claim with potentially disastrous consequences.
> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt.
It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.
Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)
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I can provide evidence for your claim. The technical debt can easily snowball if the review process is not stringent enough to keep out unnecessary functions.
Oh I'm well aware of this. I admitted defeat in a way.. I can't compete. I'm just at loss, and unless LLM stall and break for some reason (ai bubble, enshittification..) I don't see a future for me in "software" in a few years.
Somehow I appreciate this type of attitude more than the one which reflects total denial of the current trajectory. Fervent denial and AI trash-talking being maybe the single most dominant sentiment on HN over the last year, by all means interspersed with a fair amount of amazement at our new toys.
But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.
But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.
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The future is either a language model trained on AI code bloats and the ways to optimize the bloat away
OR,
something like Mercor, currently getting paid really well by Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini to pay very smart humans really well to proof language model outputs.
Yep, its a rather depressing realization isnt it. Oh well, life moves on i suppose.
I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.
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I feel the same. And I expect even a lot of the early adopters and AI enthusiasts are going to find themselves as the short end of the stick sooner than later.
"Oops I automated myself out a job".
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Yup. The majority of this website is going to find out they were grossly overpaid for a long time.
Imagine everyone who is in less technical or skilled domains.
I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.
I feel the same.
Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.
I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.
I am glad I am not younger.
So why havent you been fired already?
.......
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> the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors letting these tools rip
Does it? I have yet to see any evidence that they are a net win in terms of productivity. It seems to just be a feeling that it's more efficient.