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Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#191

Post by lackoftactics »

dietcokeflowers wrote: post #122
lelanthran wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part. If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved fro…

thank you for putting into words that which has been hard for me to describe — I’ve noticed the worse a dev was at their job the more high their opinions of AI seem to be. The subject textbook analogy (trig book in your ex.) is a perfect frame of reference for why that might be the case… to further that example, many people with the help of AI are ostensibly copy pasting trig problems from the book without understand…

other thing could be also true, if you are great developer who spent decade honing their craft (vim, working on hobby projects, grinding when your friends party) you would hold cognitive bias against it as it flips the script. I don't think our profession is going away, but the shift is happening and it's not very comfortable one.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#192

Post by lackoftactics »

sdevonoes wrote: post #142
fibonachos wrote: post #19

My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…

> What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing). This is why I don’t understand why folks around here (that are employed) feel so enthusiastic about AI. We are going to be working more in a rush to produce stuff that we won’t be feeling as proud of as we did before AI. Unless you were in the profession for the money, the delights of crafting software simply…

There was a recent interview with Dax Raad on the Pragmatic Programmer podcast, and they talked briefly about it. We would like a future where we do just a bit more work and are happier with legacy codebases or work on getting rid of tech debt, but that definitely won't be something our employers are interested in.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#193

Post by mfalcon »

I think SWEs will still be needed but to do higher level work. The thing is, there will be less SWEs per company.

Obviously I dont know ehat will happen, but my guess is that there will be more small companies highly specialized on specific niches.

If I switch to business mode, I think this is the best time to start a company because you have more leverage in your hands and also because the job market is and is going to be disrupted, at least for a while.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#195

Post by chb »

linzhangrun wrote: post #61
pyeri wrote: post #2

I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reason…

Using today's model prices as a rebuttal is a very weak argument. Two years ago, SOTA was gpt-o1, and it was much more expensive than Fable. Now, for $4,699, you can easily run a much smarter Qwen3.6-35B locally with DGX Spark. Think about where we are. This is an era where a new SOTA arrives every two months. It took LLMs only about 18 months to go from chain-of-thought reasoning to disproving the unit-distance conj…

This. And the "individual with technical savvy saving his child-like clients" scenario described earlier in this thread is delusional and Dilbertian.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#198

Post by bot41 »

lelanthran wrote: post #63
fibonachos wrote: post #19

My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…

> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part. If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved fro…

From my experience, BAs don't model the solution - they translate and document stakeholder requirements

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#199

Post by bot41 »

jdlshore wrote: post #49
montfort wrote: post #30

The profession has already changed. For the past eight months, AI has been competent enough to code like the best human programmer, but strangely, the software isn't any better yet. Everyone has lost sight of what the profession truly is. It's not just about coding; it's about software engineering. Our role is no longer that of programmers, AI has taken over that role. Our role is that of engineers who manage program…

> AI has been competent enough to code like the best human programmer It’s really not. Opus 4.8 can’t produce good software design and it still makes straightforward implementation mistakes. Two errors it made in one day for me recently: it built the Cookie class I asked for without a name field—cookies have a name and a value—and it neglected to handle a case where a database could have multiple rows with the same i…

I'd love to see your prompts for this work. Both issues seem to be easily solved and minor - unless you're looking to one prompt every change.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#200

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

dizhn wrote: post #164
nbaksalyar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying things like > it's probably an issue with your usage of if > I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt > a skill/PEBKAC issue But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute. Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not fli…

Opencode had the same flickering issue not too long ago and they fixed it by switching from ink to opentui if I am not mistaken. So a solution is possible and known. Antropic just doesn't seem to care.

OpenCode, and all these other AI consoles, all do terminal I/O in the dumbest way possible.

A good terminal program, like Emacs, uses escape sequences to create viewports, scroll text, etc. These sequences tell the terminal to do these things internally.

All the modern AI tools ignore these escape sequences (which they wouldn't even have to know if they used ncurses) and just do frame-by-frame animation. So when OpenCode wants to scroll text, first it sends the text to the screen, then it sends ^[[1;1H and sends the whole text again, minus the first line or so, adding a new line to the bottom. Then it sends ^[[1;1H again, and sends the whole text AGAIN, cutting another line from the top, and adding another new one to the bottom. As if the terminal was a graphics device and you had to draw each frame.

The flickering was probably due to sending ^[[2J to clear the screen before "drawing" each "frame."

I oversimplified, though. OpenCode sends hundreds and hundreds of cursor-positioning escape sequences per "frame" of "animation".

Even though it doesn't flicker anymore, "drawing frames" makes the scrolling noticeably slow and choppy if you run OpenCode (or any other terminal-based AI agent) on a different machine than the one your monitor is plugged into, even on a wired LAN.

No AI model can give a believable explanation of why these apps (or their TUI libraries) are written this way.

Docker also does this, and it drives me mad.

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