Comment by Fr0styMatt88
8 hours ago
It’s so strange. I think there’s a few different groups:
- Shills or people with a financial incentive
- Software devs that either never really liked the craft to begin with or who have become jaded over time and are kind of sick of it.
- New people that are actually experiencing real, maybe over-excitement about being able to build stuff for the first time.
Forgetting the first group as that one is obvious.
I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason. Software work has become a grind for them and vibe coding is actually a relief.
Group 3 I think are mostly the non-coders who are genuinely feeling that rush of being able to will their ideas into existence on a computer. I think AI-assisted coding could actually be a great on-ramp here and we should be careful not to shit on them for it.
You’re missing the group of high performers who love coding, who just want to bring more stuff in the world than their limited human brains have the energy or time to build.
I love coding. I taught myself from a book (no internet yet) when I was 10, and haven’t stopped for 30 years. Turned down becoming a manager several times. I loved it so much that I went through an existential crisis in February as I had to let go of that part of my identity. I seriously thought about quitting.
But for years, it has been so frustrating that the time it took me to imagine roughly how to build something (10-30 minutes depending on complexity) was always dwarfed by the amount of time it took to grind it out (days or sometimes weeks). That’s no longer true, and that’s incredibly freeing.
So the game now is to learn to use this stuff in a way that I enjoy, while going faster and maintaining quality where it matters. There are some gray beards out there who I trust who say it’s possible, so I’m gonna try.
Good point and I’m exactly at the same point as you with this. Working on letting go of the idea (and to be honest just the habit) that it’s somehow ‘cheating’ at the moment.
Yes I'm exactly like you as well. I've been coding for 30+ years, I still love coding and system building etc, but sometimes the level of frustration to find the information and then get something working is simply too high.
Over a weekend, I used ChatGPT to set up Prometheus and Grafana and added node exporters to everything I could think of. I even told ChatGPT to create NOC-style dashboards for me, given the metrics I gave it. This is something that would have painstakingly take several weeks if not more to figure out, and it's something I've been wanting to do but the cognitive load and anticipatory frustration was too high for me to start. I love how it enables me to just do things.
My next step is to integrate some programs that I wrote that I still use every day to collect data and then show it on the dashboards as well.
On a side note, I don't know why Grafana hasn't more deeply integrated with AI. Having to sift through all the ridiculous metrics that different node exporters advertise with no hint of naming convention makes using Grafana so much harder. I cut and pasted all the metrics and dumped it into ChatGPT and told it to make the panels I wanted (ex. "Give me a dashboard that shows the status of all my servers" and it's able to pick and choose the correct metrics across my Windows server, Macbooks and studio, my Linux machines, etc), but Grafana should have this integrated themselves directly into themselves.
But what is the point of building things if you can’t feel good about them?
^ This is a troll; new account, troll username.
I don’t think that is true. I know several very high-performing engineers (some who could have retired a long time ago and are just in it for the love of the game) who use AI prolifically, without lowering any bars, and just deliver a lot more work.
I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason.
I think it's easy to dismiss that group, but the truth is there was a lot of flux in our industry in the last decade before AI, and I would say almost none of it was beneficial in any way whatsoever.
If I had more time I could write an essay arguing that the 2010s in software development was the rise of the complexity for complexity's sake that didn't make solving real world problems any easier and often massively increased the cost of software development, and worse the drudgery, with little actually achieved.
The thought leaders were big companies who faced problems almost no-one else did, but everyone copied them.
Which led to an unpleasant coding environment where you felt like a hamster spinning in a wheel, constantly having to learn the new hotness or you were a dinosaur just to do what you could already do.
Right now I can throw a wireframe at an AI and poof it's done, react, angular, or whatever who-gives-a-flying-sock about the next stupid javascript framework it's there. Have you switched from webpack to vite to bun? Poof, AI couldn't care less, I can use whatever stupid acronym command line tool you've decided is flavour of the month. Need to write some Lovecraftian-inspired yaml document for whatever dumbass deploy hotness is trending this week? AI has done it and I didn't have to spend 3 months trying to debug whatever stupid format some tit at netflix or amazon or google or meta came up with because they literally had nothing better to do with their life and bang my head against the wall when it falls over every 3 weeks but management are insisting the k8s is the only way to deploy things.
That in itself feels like second-system syndrome but instead of playing out over a single software project it’s the large-scale version playing out over the entire industry.
> I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason.
I say this kindly, but are you sure that _you_ aren't the one in group 2, and _they_ aren't the ones learning new things?
A lot of the discourse around ai coding reminds me of when I went to work for a 90s tech company around 2010 and all the linux guys _absolutely refused_ to learn devops or cloud stuff. It sucks when a lifetime of learned skills becomes devalued over night.
That’s pretty fair, I’m currently in the “trying to get over the feeling that it’s cheating” phase and also just haven’t formed the habit yet of reaching for AI as a tool in my toolbox; particularly in things like pre-review AI-assisted code review, which I’ve found really useful but sometimes don’t think of doing when I could.
Personally I'm getting sick of the slop. If anything that is whats making me care less.