Comment by poisonborz
13 hours ago
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.
And I'm sure elevator operators stood pressing buttons long after they didn't need to...
We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.
There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.
It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.
It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.
The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.
I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.
You’re talking past me.
I’m lamenting the change because the thing the love about this job is being ripped away from me.
I’m still far more adapted to this than my coworkers though. Hell I have a GB10 box I run local models on for fun.
Says the pro-Elon shill who is just here to boost xAI and demoralize people.
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.
It's like saying who likes to ride a bicycle in the world of cars, you can do it much easier with a plain steering wheel.
Well... sure it's more efficient (although in some cities and certain routes it's not; same with coding and LLMs). But some of us just love riding the bicycle and enjoying the nature, you know. Perhaps even strengthening our muscles as we do it, as a healthy side effect.
> but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate
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.
I definitely comprehend coding language better/faster when I want to fully understand a program. I usually skip docs and go to the sources when possible. I think it's deeper than just the code though, the biggest thing I haven't seen in using natural language is good organization to express the program.
I think the premise is that yes, you can do that. However many don’t and many in larger corps are pushed expressly to not work that way.
> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.
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> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
Skill issue.
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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.
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> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I love these parts. But in my experience, LLMs break much of that.
Planning/architecting? Great. So far, I haven't found any agent that actually follows the plans set out, though. They get something wrong, and it snowballs from here.
Directing a team, steering and giving advice? Absolutely. Some of my greatest achievements involve mentoring. But human teams learn from their mistakes, grow up and contribute insights. Agents don't.
Reviewing code? Well, maybe not so much fun, but it's usually a good way to understand what's going on, and to share experience. Except with agents, you need to spend most of your brainpower seeing through the misleading comments and documentation and choices and sycophancy, and the agent never learns from its mistakes.
Designing interfaces and APIs? Absolutely. Yet every time I look at code modified by my agent, I see that the contracts (internal or public) have been broken by the latest edits.
In my experience, LLMs can be very useful, for refactorings and as learning and review assistants, and sometimes as replacement for missing documentation. But codegen is the worst way to use them.
> Who likes typing code
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.
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.
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.
>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.
And these will be gone, too, a couple months later. Or possibly even at the same time.
>Who likes...
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.
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code then you're not a programmer, you're a middle manager. So maybe you never actually wanted to be a programmer but instead you liked having things built?
I think you’ve forgotten about the “software architect” role.
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code, then you’re not a programmer, you’re a software architect.
Middle managers have to supervise people, otherwise they are not managers.
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.
It's not that clear and still involves coding. But as I start coding and modules/APIs/classes take shape, it gets to a point where I say "ok, from here on it's just filling in the blanks".
But filling in the blanks can still involve a lot of grindy, time consuming work where you iterate through collections, build parameters for other APIs, check invariants etc. All of that stuff is boring to me.
What I'm trying to say is that most coding tasks require "senior level thinking" and "intern level thinking". The latter can sometimes be the majority of the work and I don't want to do that anymore.
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.
>Who likes typing code...
Mmm..almost everyone who loves programming. If I hated typing code, I would not been a programmer, because it used to involve a lot of typing.
Or else you did it for $$$. But then don't assume every one who programs hates typing code.
Or maybe you did it because you had ideas for things computers ought to be able to do, and needed to get those ideas into the computer?
> 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.
Me! I do!
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I'd rather eat rusty barbed wire. I'd avoid your middle manager hellscape even if if doubled my salary, I swear!
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 don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Based on your post, you never liked programming in the first place. You liked having software. Typing the code in, reading the documentation, all that stuff is programming.
You should check out HandWaveLang.
It doesn't exist yet, but you could easily create it.
> Who likes typing code
Hackers.
> And who likes ... reviewing code
I was with you on your second list until this part. It feels like a poison pill rider that's added to a bill in Congress, because I've always found code review to be the single most soul-sucking aspect of the job.
I'll grant that may be at least partially due to poor practices at the places I've worked, but semi-regularly having large PRs that take hours to comb through and where you either rubber-stamp it or look like the bad guy (because you're retarding release velocity) has never been particularly fulfilling.
I had great discussions in PRs, debates we would never have in real life conversations. In these times review is maybe the last holdout to think teams have control over the code. AI made also this nicer by making summaries and answering the stupid questions without shame before turning to the author with confident criticism.
It sounds like this message isn’t for you then?
Spoke like a true manager.
Sounds dreamy. Let's plug in and "write" code without interacting with anyone ever. That way you can further abstract yourself from all meaningful connections to become more efficient. Seriously cannot get inside the head of people like you.
that's because you are not programming