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Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

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Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#81

Post by handoflixue »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #55
beambot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

> If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous AI was doing 0% of my work 10 years ago too, why should I be any less effective without it now? You think I'm behind the curve because I'm not buying into the AI craze? Ok. What's so important about being on the curve anyways, exactly? My boss won't pay me a single cent more for using AI, so why should I care?

We used to do all our math on slide rules. They're just as effective as they always were.

But when you're being graded on a curve, standing still can still mean falling behind.

Which isn't to say that AI is definitively ahead of the curve; I think we're a bit early for that. But as actual answers to your actual questions - it's important because if everyone else gets ahead of you, your boss will STOP paying you

(and if you're "good at AI", you can at least make bank until the bubble bursts)

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#82

Post by antisol »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #62
exfalso wrote: post #38

Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development. I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative. I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well. I…

No, you're not alone I find it wastes my time more than it helps Everyone insists I must be using it wrong I was never arrogant enough to think I'm a superior coder to many people, but AI code is so bad and the experience using it is so tedious that I'm starting to seriously question the skills of anyone who finds themselves more productive using AI for code instead of writing it themselves

Agreed.

perhaps 1% of the time I've asked an LLM to write code for me, has it given me something useful and not taken more time than just writing the thing myself.

It has happened, but those instances are vastly outnumbered by it spewing out garbage that I would be professionally embarrassed to ever commit into a repo, and/or me repeatedly screaming at it "no, dumbass, I already told you why that isn't a solution to the problem"

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#83

Post by arun_sharma2020 »

We are expanding our software engineering team, and management has suggested focusing on hiring senior developers, as they are more likely to quickly grasp AI capabilities and write effective prompts. However, in my personal opinion, while tools like GitHub Copilot are helpful for simpler tasks, they are not well-suited for complex areas—especially payment calculations and payment gateway integrations.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#84

Post by nicbou »

torginus wrote: post #33
827a wrote: post #15

Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage". My organization…

> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore. I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.

As I wrote in a root comment, it’s decimating the traffic of informational websites. We will lose a lot of those websites that produced high-effort, simple-conclusion information. Who will bother with in-depth reviews if someone else gets the sale? Who will patiently answer questions if no one asks anymore?

I think that a certain kind of craftsmanship will be lost.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#86

Post by dcminter »

jraph wrote: post #24

Patiently looking forward for the HN front page to be about something else than generative AI.

Essentially off-topic but while that's my perception too, actually there are only 3 out of 30 front page stories on AI at the current time, so it's more like 10%

It's definitely the most consistent topic but there's a lot of other stuff.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#87

Post by ath3nd »

beambot wrote: post #42
chrisco255 wrote: post #9

AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc? AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptica…

You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

> You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

There are reasons that seasoned OSS developers reject AI PRs: https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/ (like the creator of curl). Additionally, the only study to date currently measuring the impact on LLMs on experienced developers found a modest 19% decline in productivity when using an LLM for their daily work.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Now we can ponder behind the reasons that the study showed experienced developers get a decrease of productivity, and you anecdotally experience a boost of "productivity", but why think about things when we can ask an LLM?

- experienced developers -> measured decrease of productivity

- you -> perceived increase of productivity

Here is what ChatGPT-5 thinks about the potential reason (AI slop below):

"Why You Might Feel More Productive

If senior developers are seeing a decline in productivity, but you are experiencing the opposite, it stands to reason that you are more junior. Here are some reasons why LLMs might help junior developers like you to feel more productive:

Lower Barrier to Entry

- LLMs help fill in gaps in knowledge—syntax, APIs, patterns—so you can move faster without constantly Googling or reading docs.

- Confidence Boost You get instant feedback, suggestions, and explanations. That can make you feel more capable and reduce hesitation.

- Acceleration of Learning You’re not just coding—you’re learning as you go. LLMs act like a tutor, speeding up your understanding of concepts and best practices.

- More Output, Less Friction You might be producing more code, solving more problems, and feeling that momentum—especially if you are just starting your coding journey."

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#88

Post by hn_throw2025 »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #75

Pretty pessimistic frankly. Management at all levels pushing for nearshoring SWE labor, meanwhile we’re training AI as a long term solution to fill the skill gap in the same nearshore labor. We were hired to be smart people and it’s frankly an insult to gaslight us into believing that it’s simply because it makes us more productive. Of course there’s a push for it with the intent to replace us. Why else would it be f…

> Of course there’s a push for it with the intent to replace us. Why else would it be forced down our throats?

I still don’t see this, if only for the Managerial instinct for ass-covering.

If something really matters and a prod showstopper emerges, can those non-technical supervisory managers be completely, absolutely, 100% sure the AI can fix the code and bring everything back up? If not, the buck would surely stop with them and they would be utterly helpless in that situation. The Board waiting on conference call while they stare at a pageful of code that may as well be written in ancient Sumerian.

I can see developers taking a higher level role and using these tools, but I can’t really see managers interfacing directly with AI code generation. Unless they are completely risk tolerant, and you don’t get far up the greasy pole with those tendencies.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#89

Post by fiftyacorn »

roarcher wrote: post #76

I recently used Claude to help me understand a math-dense research paper. It was useful for answering general questions about the structure of the algorithm, where to find information in the paper, and gain a high level/intuitive understanding of how the algorithm worked. It was absolutely abysmal at implementing the code, and would regularly make things up when I probed it about subtleties in the math. Overall, it s…

I was on reddit/math and someone was talking about how they were trying to get AI to create there final year thesis from uni. They tried 4-5 different AI solutions and reckoned they got 40-60% of the work from AI but it couldnt conclude the project. A few others on the thread had said the same

Doesnt mean it wont get there - just that it isnt there yet

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#90

Post by DanielHB »

roarcher wrote: post #76

I recently used Claude to help me understand a math-dense research paper. It was useful for answering general questions about the structure of the algorithm, where to find information in the paper, and gain a high level/intuitive understanding of how the algorithm worked. It was absolutely abysmal at implementing the code, and would regularly make things up when I probed it about subtleties in the math. Overall, it s…

I mostly used it for exploratory analysis of tools/libraries I am not familiar with, where it points me the parts of the API docs I need to lookup to verify the output. Then I manually adapt or rewrite it.

So in the end I use it fairly often when setting up new things (new infra, new files, new tools, new functions, etc). Although the time it saves is not coding time, but googling/boilerplating time. But in practice I work in a well established project where I rarely do this kind of thing (I don't think I even created a new file in the project last week).

If I am already familiar with the tool/library I almost always skip it (occasionally autocomplete is useful, but I could easily live without it). Occasionally I used for small self-contained snippets of code (usually no more than a single function). Last one I remember was some date formatting code.

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