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Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

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Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#271

Post by aenis »

veunes wrote: post #97
j1436go wrote: post #56

Happy for everyone who enjoys it. For me it's the opposite: AI everywhere sucks the joy out of it and I'm seriously starting to consider a career shift after roughly 10 years of writing code for a living.

I feel you. There's a massive difference between crafting and assembling. AI turns us from artisans carving a detail into assembly line operators. If your joy came from solving algorithmic puzzles and optimizing loops, then yes, AI kills that It might be worth looking into low-level dev (embedded, kernel, drivers) or complex R&D. Vibe coding doesn't work there yet, and the cost of error is too high for hallucinations…

It helped me finish my webRTC client for a esp32 microcontroller. Thats fairly low level. It did it without breaking a sweat - 2hrs, and we had a model which works with my pipecat-based based server.

I loaded the lowest level piece of software I wrote in the last 15 years - a memory spoofing aimbot poc exploiting architectural issues in x86 (things like memory breakpoints set on logical memory - not hw addresses - allowing to read memory without tripping kernel-level detection tools, ability to trigger PFs on pages where the POC was hiding to escape detection, low level gnarly stuff like this). I asked it to clean up the code base and propose why it would not work under current version of windows. It did that pretty well.

Lower level stuff does of course exist, but not a whole lot IMHO. I would not assume claude will struggle with kernel level stuff at all. If anything, this is better documented than the over-abstraced mainstream stuff.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#272

Post by stephenr »

Look, do what works for you obviously but this just reinforces my view that the people who see "AI Code agents" as a useful thing, are the people who don't know how to write code themselves.

For the same reason things like Image Playground/etc seem magical/appealing to non-artists (myself included): we don't know how to do it ourselves, so it feels empowering.

Or more close to home: it's the same reason that developers are so in love with clicking some buttons in the dashboard in spite of the costs, lock-in, more costs, yet more costs, and of course the extra costs.

As with those choosing "cloud" services they don't need, here too there will no doubt be a lucrative market to fix the shit once people realise that there's a reason experts charge the way they do.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#273

Post by pahbloo »

There is an interesting pattern emerging in this thread. There are a lot of 'same here' and 'opposite for me' comments, but both sides are converging on the same point: people developing software to solve a problem.

Many who are considering a career shift away from software due to 'AI disgust' devoted their lives to developing software because they loved the craft. But with AI churning out cheap, ugly, but passable code, it's clear that businesses never appreciated the craft. I hope these folks find an area outside of SWE that they love just as much.

But once these folks find this area, it would be naive to think they won't use software to scratch their itch. In the same way that people who didn't pursue a career in SWE (because they felt under-qualified) are using AI to solve their problems, these folks will now find their own problems to solve with software, even if at first that is not their intention. They probably won't use AI to write the code, but ultimately, AI is forcing everyone to become a product manager.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#274

Post by aenis »

ikidd wrote: post #21

Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago. Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of featur…

100% this, too. I am an IT professional - CTO for a large-ish enterprise (25-30bn yearly revenue). I am finding myself waking up at 4am every single day for the last 2 months to vibe code stuff i always wanted to build for myself, my family and friends, and never quite had the time for it. My sleep habits are definitely suffering but my happines is through the roof.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#275

Post by myth_drannon »

I didn't quit coding but I also vibe coded something similar despite having found thousands of similar utilities (retirement calculators) so I vibe coded (with base44) https://boringretirementcalculator.com

What can I say... If you used a calculator to get an answer for sqrt(2) are you back to doing mathematics? It's simpler and more fun instead of using Newton method. But it's debatable if you are actually working on mathematics problems.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#276

Post by sarmasamosarma »

mr_mitm wrote: post #135
latexr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you. Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you? Not everything needs to be or should be dumbed down to appeal to lowest common denominator. Alternatively, go work at a company where you’re part of a team and…

> Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you. No one is also keeping me from doing what I want to spend my time with on my days off. > Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you? No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects. What a weird question. > No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detai…

[dead]

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#277

Post by dormento »

brushfoot wrote: post #175
ivcatcher wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, It was written by AI because I'm not a native English speaker, I don't want to make any grammer issues. ( this reply is not by AI :-)

Your linked site has an AI-generated blog. If this were about grammar, it would be appropriate to translate something you wrote, not use generative AI to create it. This whole thing is an ad. All the post's sentiments that people are engaging with ("imposter syndrome" etc.) were spit out by a clanker. What a disheartening start to my morning.

They even wrote "grammer", to garner sympathy. Crafty.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#278

Post by aenis »

fourside wrote: post #264

> Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean." I’m not an AI hater but I do see this as evidence of LLMs being susceptible to chasing trends as much as people. Next.js with server rendered React is not a stack that an experienced web developer would have recommended for a “clean” solution to a collection of financial calculator…

Could be, but that stack happens to also solve for a lot of problems totally unexperienced people will struggle with (such as, to not look too far, CORS issues). Good reco for a non-tech person to build a frontend. And besides, who cares which stack is used as long as its used. Its not like this will ever be maintained. If anything, if a need for a new feature emerges 5 months down the road the whole thing can be re-done from scratch in one sitting without writing a single line of code.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#279

Post by elzbardico »

meetingthrower wrote: post #166
keyle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear. It too shall pass. They'll get tired, they'll grind the same apps 500 times and leave. Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.

Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - w…

Don't care about the critics. What you're doing is what people were doing in the 80s with their new PCs and tools that democratized this kind of development, like Basic and DBase.

Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that and will end up getting unemployed anyway in the next few years.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#280

Post by scirob »

lrvick wrote: post #195
vim-guru wrote: post #71

I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(

Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans. Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- t…

have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not .

And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues

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