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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

#351

Post by newsoftheday »

abalashov wrote: post #244
lelanthran wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre. I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial? How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only…

> How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec. There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made. There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all,…

>it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer

Businesses don't pay for CRUD apps, businesses pay for apps that solve problems which often involves CRUD to persist their valuable data. This is often within the sometimes very strange and difficult to understand business logic which varies greatly from one business to another. That is what "CRUD app developers" actually do, so dismissing them as though there is zero business logic and only CRUD is doing them, us, a disservice.

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

#352

Post by solumunus »

latexr wrote: post #233
solumunus wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Features are requested from me, I deliver them to the customer, the customer is happy and pays me. I deliver solutions and the customer deems them to be value for their business... What else am I supposed to call that? I'm extremely diligent around vetting all code in my repo's. Everything is thoroughly tested and follows the same standards that were in my codebase before the invention of LLM's. I'm not "vi…

Yes yes, so does a street sweeper. Someone pays them because the road is dirty, and they use a broom to deliver the solution of a cleaner street, which is of value to the user. Do you see why that’s marketing speak? You’re using vague terms which can be applied to anything. It avoids commitment and makes whatever you do seem grandiose. That’s marketing. A few years ago, every app developer and designer was a “story t…

No, not at all. There are people who love coding for the sake of it, they are passionate about the technology and would be doing it whether it was their career or not. They do it for fun. We both write software, but I derive pleasure from making money from products, they derive pleasure from the writing itself. If I could no longer sell products and make money I wouldn’t do any coding. You don’t think there is any distinction between them and I?

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

#353

Post by aenis »

sarchertech wrote: post #340
aenis wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its already the present. For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it mai…

> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself. I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5. If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.

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

#354

Post by Workaccount2 »

Jaygles wrote: post #341
Workaccount2 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers. The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content. For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash fr…

> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma. Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to. They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall. Consumers then are left withou…

40-50% of people are ad-blocking some rather beloved content creators. That means, not paying for premium, and not viewing ads.

Ok, so maybe they are suscribing to patreon? Maybe Nebula?

Well those two have conversion rates around (on a good day) 1%.

You can swim in the waters of cognitive dissonance because ads really do suck and ad block is a great way to stop the pain while still getting what you want.

Understand though, the statistics are so damning against the ad-block crowd, that you come off like the people screeching about human generated CO2 being totally fine for the environment (It helps plants grow!) because they cannot imagine having to give up commuting in their diesel monster pick-up truck everyday. (Ad block does no damage because I cannot imagine having to see ads...)

As an aside, ironically, security nightmare ads are really only served to people with tracking blockers, because those people are the lowest value visitors and only scammers/bottom feeders really bid on their views. Regular tech illiterate people get ads for Tide and Toyota. The more you know.

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

#355

Post by int3trap »

jakewindle47 wrote: post #330

LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…

Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?

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

#356

Post by ozzyphantom »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #334

This is great, but it misses one thing: The software paradigm is changing. People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often. That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.

This is only partially true.

For the foreseeable future until maybe we systems that can predict what someone will need/want for an app at any given time (a prospect as horrifying as it is awesome imo), there’ll be plenty of people, maybe even a majority, that don’t know what they want or need until it’s shown to them.

There will be many more niche applications vibe-coded by people with lots of knowledge and no coding experience/desire that people will use rather than thinking of an app themselves to create.

Then there will be people like you, me, OP and 99% of the other HN community that have a million ideas they want to create, use, and sometimes share.

There are a lot of things I don’t know about and even more I don’t know I don’t know about and in those cases, there’s still a wide open door for people to create applications and experiences that share their knowledge/vision.

I could ask Claude Code or some other future platform to build be a financial calculator every time I need it but why would I do that when someone with the benefit of prior knowledge and experience has already done that for me?

They probably included calculators I didn’t even know I needed.

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

#357

Post by cbdevidal »

7777332215 wrote: post #300
cbdevidal wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must depend on the person. I’ve been coding for all my life but have never been GOOD. I thoroughly enjoy coding, despite being frustrated many times. Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing. For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.

You could read the syntax and see what it logically did. But you likely don't always know why it did something, and you definitely don't know why another way wasn't chosen (maybe that way would have better aligned with your long term goals)

I do know why. I read the code and understand it. Reading code for me is easier than writing it.

You're right though about it not choosing some different path, I might or I might not know that.

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

#358

Post by uuuuuquu »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #331
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #321

>> The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck. While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for e…

Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers. The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content. For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash fr…

Correlation is not causation.

The internet is shitty in many ways and ads are one reason. You can pay for ad-free streaming but still get low bitrate although you paid enough to cover traffic costs for higher bitrate. You can pay to have ad-free instagram but still see all this shitty AI-generated crap and bot posts. You can pay for Youtube Premium but Google will still massively invade your privacy.

Do you really think that if everybody turned off their ad blockers and paid for premium services, the internet would become better? The way I see it, corporate greed would milk consumers even more.

Instead of surrendering to ads, we should promote directly donating to (or supporting) YouTubers or websites that provide value to us.

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

#359

Post by cableshaft »

sodapopcan wrote: post #285
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 :(

I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!

I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans.

Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.

I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).

They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.

I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.

It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.

Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).

I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.

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

#360

Post by wincy »

int3trap wrote: post #355
jakewindle47 wrote: post #330

LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…

Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?

My guess is because it’s turning development into a Red Queen’s Race [0] where everyone has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. If everyone else is using LLMs, how can you stay competitive without using them?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

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