Comment by rco8786
10 hours ago
Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this. 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.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.
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.
This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.
I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.
> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I have no idea where you work but 90% of companies are not like that. In fact, it's the opposite: filled with awful management, terrible timelines and legacy code.
Engineering had always been a nuisance to them and getting basic approval for maintenance regarding technical debt has been an uphill battle.
Wow. That was hardly ever the case in my experience in ~30 years in the industry. I enjoy(ed) what you’re describing too but… how common was this for you?
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I’ve enjoyed it too.
One of the fun things to do would be to use the 8 hrs of work to spend about 4-5 hrs working on deliverables, which was usually sufficient to exceed expectations, using 2-3 of the remaining hours (I’d keep 1-2 hrs for myself), to make significant architectural improvements.
I’d bring in an improvement every 6 months or so and suddenly the app would get significantly better and I’d get credit for it.
I was in that boat also
> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
The nicest thing was when you nailed down the architecture and then you are mostly twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the PM guys to have the next feature idea. Maintenance and bug fixing is a breeze.
>I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom
Where do you work! :)
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> not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities.
Those are the parts the LLM is bad at. The 1% of stuff that was interesting was worth looking forward to.
I’m unconvinced about architecture mattering much. I used to think that, but these days I’m leaning towards it being the product of a problem we don’t have anymore. Architecture used to be dangerous and time-consuming to redo. If an AI can do that safely for $100 or $1000 in tokens (one day), that ROI is maybe negative
In a big production codebase with lots of active customers and data, architecture changes still feel pretty difficult even with LLMs accelerating them by an order of magnitude — migrating and backfilling data and all of that. That’s more complex than pointing Claude at a repo and saying “rewrite this in Rust.”
I guess you’re right, though - what is the ROI of keeping the architecture clean? It certainly saves time and money later, but it’s unclear if it’s a net win.
(It’s of course also significant to note that the upfront work of figuring out the right architecture and keeping the code clean has also been correspondingly reduced as well. Both sides of the equation are affected…)
The industry never really figured out a way to reliably answer this question in the pre-LLM days either, so… I suspect it will continue to be hard to determine.
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in my experience it takes more than a day to sufficiently migrate bad architecture to a good one. like, many more days than it took to vibe the original implementation. having the prototype is good to understand what you want, but then going back and rebuilding it properly is a longer task. which is fine.
I think this is not "parallel universe". Selection bias: people who love to code often choose non trivial frontier work. They tend to grirf about agentic workflow the most. Myself included.
It sounds like you could be on my team, tbh.
I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.
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
There's a lot of code I never wanted to be an expert on. I might care about an algorithm. I might care about the UX. There are other things I might let an AI tackle because I don't care about them.
That is a problem though with AI currently. E.g. I've found a severe issue with Claude Code and prose writing when trying to make an explainer site. Instead of "plain" english it likes to use "flowery" phrases and "punchy" statements. This forces the user to spend extra time thinking about it.
And code comments are terrible. It can use 3 paragraphs to describe something when only one sentence is enough. Then further agents (or humans) have to waste their context window to figure out what the "riddle-ly" worded sentences mean.
But the things you care the most about, the AI doesn't unless you tell it to care. And even then, you have to be very careful because it acts more like a contractor with the potential to stop in the middle of a project (lack of tokens) and leave it in a very bad state until it's complete.
Or worse, it forgets what you want and does it's own thing for a while until you remind it.
Devs were always feeding the machine to replace everyone else.
We were always replacing ourselves: Every "reusable" function or class or library you ever wrote represents lines of code won't get paid to write again. Every compiler takes jobs away from assembly coders.
The looming thing today is qualitatively different, because it's not formalizing something to reliably mass-produce.
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It’s a point that isn’t made often. AI is mostly saying the quiet part out loud.
The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.
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> Everyone in SWE is experiencing this.
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.
Yes. The people that didn't enjoy coding say that.
AI is great enabler for stuff that you don't want to be good at, it cut a ton of chore type jobs out of my workflow, but for stuff you do want to get better and care for, it's both joy killer, and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.
I enjoy coding deeply, and my feelings are not that simple.
I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.
I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.
Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.
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There are many of us who enjoyed coding, and who enjoy the new paradigm, too.
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People are really not as black and white as you are making them out to be. Most coders cared both about writing the code and the end result.
> and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.
I’ve been coding over four decades and it is clear to me that most programmers don’t know how the stuff works, and not just script kiddies but some PhDs I worked with.
For those who want to know how it works, LLMs are massive enablers. I’ve written so many debugging and inspection tools with an LLM; had a model explain the assembly language produced; had rubber duck conversations with it. I’m having such fun tbh.
That's a very simplistic view. I'm very good at writing tests and I'm happy to offload writing tests to LLMs, as long as they follow the structure I've provided.
You're saying that I must not be good in writing tests, irregardless on how I feel about test writing.
People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of them were in technology. I hope agents quickly become good enough to completely commoditize any supposed function they perform, and forces them to leave this industry.
This is an extremely “all or nothing” take. I love computers and started programming in elementary school. I am having more fun now building software than I can remember.
I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.
But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.
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You can love technology and still have thought that coding was a required path to get to technology and not the ends unto itself.
If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.
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That's reductive.
I love writing code, but I don't love every single part of writing code. In particular, I really disliked getting stuck on some irrelevant detail, some mysterious error that had nothing to do with my code (dep issues, OS quirks, silent changes, auth failures, researching alternatives), and spinning my tires, unable to work on what I wanted to accomplish. Often I never made it through the far side; I've got a project directory littered with half-finished projects.
Having an AI to figure all that junk out for me so I can focus on the thing I want to build is fantastic. I worry about losing the grip I still have, but for now I've lost some things I loved (a lot of actual code-writing, solving nice straightforward problems), but gained what might as well be superpowers to help with some real shortcomings I had. It's been a net-positive trade for me so far.
And none of my personal projects have made me rich yet...
> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents
In other words, people who just wanted to become managers.
Why did you expand it from what he said? I love technology, I enjoy being able to solve problems with technology and coding. I've always felt neutral about the actual act of coding, it was always just a means to the end and now I love that I can do more problem solving in less time and with less toil (from my view). But I guess I was just in it for the money.
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I got into software later in life because I wanted to be able to send my kids to college, have healthcare and not destroy my body by 50. Up until my 40s I was a landscaper who had been an amateur programmer and technologist since my teens. I worked really, really hard to get where I am. I went to a bootcamp 5 nights a week for a year after breaking my back all day at my “real job”, while also taking care of a wife and two kids.
I enjoy what I do but I confess to being “in technology” because I need to earn a living not because it’s some sort of passion project. I think it’s pretty horrible to wish us all out of job so you can feel superior again.
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> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents.
Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.
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FWIW I hate huge chunks of the industry + its inhabitants and am somewhat happy that my GPU can replace a significant amount of interactions with it and them.
Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech. We can be free[1].
__
[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine
I love all those things, started coding as a 10 year old(30 years ago).
The stuff I’m building is things I could only dream of before. With LLMs, I can build things in a year that would have taken me a lifetime before.
People hate generalizations
Generally, people hate generalizations
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> 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 venture to say that this number is small. Most SWEs get into it because they don't view writing code as a "burden".
The people who are "liberated" aren't the SWEs, it's the people higher up the ladder than the SWEs, who can't or don't want to be bothered with coding anymore. For them, managing a fleet of agents is easier than managing a group of SWEs.
Most of the code I was paid to write is a burden. I've spent far more hours writing generic CRUD apps, debugging overly complex javascript tooling (almost always out of date) and other tedious grunt work.
I don't think it's fair to say that all SWEs swing one way or the other. I absolutely love the fact that I will never have to waste time debugging cargo culted, trendy libraries ever again while I am also sad I'll also never to get hand write elegant implementations of interesting problems ever again either (unless for fun).
I would be happy to keep writing code but I'm also happy to be liberated from the type of code I was often paid to write.
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For me typing out code was always the annoying part. The fun comes from fixing problems, optimizing for speed, making the UX flow better and visuals look nice, all things that are on the level of software not code.
Agents help you bang out good code faster if you know how to use them. My relationship to Claude and DeepSeek is somewhere between an IDE, a coworker and a friend (I still have real friends don't worry).
I don't treat it as a world changing magic wand that fundamentally changes the way everything works. It's more like a fast forward button that lets me skip the boring part in exchange for some hand holding. No more dealing with syntax errors or finding trivial bugs.
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Soon enough the clankers will automate that part too. I'm eager to see how "liberated" those people are going to feel then.
Totally, I can't quite imagine an AI automating my use of AI tough, how it would infer what prompt I would use at any given time, the problem space is infinite. Am I adding another *arr app to my stack, are we building a SPA, a home automation plugin, whatever. These are things that I want to do and AI helps with that.
In the corporate setting I think though it won't take a lot of time to reduce the layers and number of people that are required to run a software company. Either one becomes a more general work manager or obsolete I guess.
It is remarkable to me how few people seem to understand it is a much smaller step for AI-generated software to kill the need for companies of idea men than it was for them to kill the need for people writing code.
All of your potential customers are just going to vibecode their own software. In many cases they won't even realize that the software they vibecoded even exists as it will just be an invisible tool the LLM built for itself to reproduce a similar solution to a similar prompt over and over.
Once AI flattens out any company enough, the company itself no longer needs to exist, it can trivially be replaced by the model providers. Companies exist to be collections of skilled people with a common goal. When you don't need that, you don't need companies. The agents can work for your customer instead of you and nothing changes except who gets paid (not you).
There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
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Its nice to know others feel this way. I do feel some kind of despair when I think about the kind of work I used to do even just a year ago compared to now. A coworker of mine took FMLA recently to figure out what they want to do next because they no longer feel even the slightest fulfillment from swe.
Of course this does not undo any grief, dismiss it, or better their situation:
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.
That just makes it feel like I wasted a lot of time. I spent years eschewing social gatherings, foregoing other opportunities, and depriving myself of things I enjoy, to cultivate a set of skills. Now I feel like they are rapidly becoming largely irrelevant (vuln hunting, kind of on the leading edge of ai displacement, not sure bug bounties as we currently know them will exist in five years time). What's more I don't feel like I'm positioned to remain employed in the field. I didn't expect my status or stability to be thrown into jeopardy so rapidly. I wish I were as selfless as you. I'm not sure many people are, maybe the world would be a kinder place if they were
that probably makes it feel even worse for most people
imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.
It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.
> It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others
The most vocal denouncers of egoism are utterly pathologic egoists themselves.
All this supposed fun, is always something fairly simple that would take maybe a hundred or thousand hours of practice to build, it was never out of reach of them, they just felt they didn’t have the time or motivation to build that skill. (even a 1000 hour project can be done in 6 months outside of work time) Now they don’t need it. If there is any fun in this, it is an extremely shallow, garden variety sort of fun that comes from consuming content. They will never experience the deep fun that comes from being immersed creatively in a project, which I would trade anytime for something shallow.
I don't think your expectation is reasonable for the majority.
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Tell us more about your mastery of every creative domain.
This comment is the "Eat your broccoli because there are starving kids in China" of SWE.
No, that's not quite the same.
We aren't suddenly seeing 10x the software output that these 10 joyful people are producing. I think it's more likely that 10x people are suddenly trying to figure out a way to low-effort scam money with AI. And a few of those people have teamed up with VC's to make AI products to scrape the bottom of the pond for desperate suckers looking to scam money. There's 10x the headaches for existing projects that suddenly have to deal with low-effort bugreps from people looking to show that they are now "expert software engineers" because they can write "go find the bugs in Project X" and an AI will possibly do that.
There are some interesting things being built by AI, but 10x the number of joyful software engineers ain't it.
Not everyone is going to publish their creations, not everyone is on HN, and not everyone on HN is going to shout from the rooftops about how they are in that larger group of newly-enabled people.
Every new technology is going to also enable bad people, just like the Internet enabled scammers, it enabled a lot more people to be more productive.
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[citation needed]
Doubly so when you consider the history of every previous advance that was supposed to free people from the tyranny of needing a developer to make software, from COBOL forward. Some people indeed made their own applications, while everyone else rejected doing that and preferred to pay someone to do it for them.
Comparative advantage ("Is this the best use of my time?") is a real thing, and the human time to make and maintain non-trivial software will always itself be real.
> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.
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.
> And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
We had our work stolen and they're squeezing us with it, all for garbage, what in the world are you talking about.
The Luddites literally turned to violence when their profession was replaced by better technology. This has been happening for generations to every profession. There is joy in learning new things and developing new skills though.
The Luddites did not resort to violence (unless you count sabotage of machinery as violence), and they were not protesting against better technology. They were protesting against the exploitation of the workers that these machines enabled. Formerly, weaving textiles was a relatively well paid and highly skilled profession, then these machines largely automated the process. This lead to the means of production being owned by the wealthy, employing badly paid and overworked people, to make themselves even richer.
The “violence” was a simple act of sabotage, nobody got hurt except some peace of machinery and the wallets of the rich exploiters.
Well, that is not entirely true. The British parliament made sabotaging work machinery punishable by death. So people did in fact get hurt, the people who were hurt were the Luddites, and the people hurting them was the British state executing them.
The Luddites only wanted to keep their jobs.
It's so funny watching tech workers spout propaganda about the Luddites.
Brother, they're you. You just don't realize it yet.
Not everyone. I’ve been a solo entrepreneur since 2015. Developing stuff now feels like I can unwrap a present every day.
I never cared about the social aspects of it other than releasing the odd plugin I developed.
My social life is entirely offline.
> And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting
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.
> 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.
Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
> Moreover, it's downright offensive for a purported expert to defer their expertise to a SAAS black box.
With programming, it's just the opposite, though.
Programmers work with abstractions. Understanding the full system down to how atoms work is too much to think of when e.g. writing an API handler. So instead you work with modules and their interfaces.
Pre-LLM, if you need some task done, you wouldn't write it all out yourself if there was some external package which did the work for you.
Of course, when using an LLM, you don't need to surrender your ability to think about the problem and solution.
What is an abstraction? An abstraction is far more than a black box. From a previous comment:
> High-level programming languages use well-defined, limited syntax to encode program behavior in a deterministic way. Compilers translate these directions into programs that should have identical behavior between compiler runs and between different compilers. (If they don't, that's a compiler bug, or else an artifact of UB.) This means you can structurally and provably rely on the high-level programming layer without worrying about what's underneath: the assembly is abstracted away. You also get the massive benefit of being able to tweak and improve the assembly layer independently of the programming language layer, so long as the contract between language and compiler is not violated.
> If AI is a "layer of abstraction," so is working with a bunch of contractors to make your app. The definition is broadened to the point of absurdity. (Solely: "I don't have to think about code anymore," which only touches on the most superficial aspect of an abstraction.)
With a good high-level abstraction, I can mostly think on the level of the abstraction, but I can also dive down through the layers and figure out what's actually going on in each one.
> Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
Using is one thing; inventing is another. I have seen no evidence that LLMs have the capacity to discover and leverage new abstractions. To me, that's the most exciting part of programming: finding ways to reify powerful concepts and then turn complex tasks into simple ones, ad infinitum.
> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.
Speak for yourself.