Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

calquio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 460 posts

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

#82

Post by 1dom »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #70
mr_mitm wrote: post #58

Same here. Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious. I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work.…

Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out. So you value your ability to churn out insignificant dreck over the ability of others to use the internet? Because that's the choice you're making. All of the sites that churn your browser for a few seconds because they're trying to block AI DDoS bots, that's worth y…

This is such a... unique angle. Of all the things to get angry at AI for, web crawlers and the impact on cloudflare outages are the ones that really grinds your gears?

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

#84

Post by bitwize »

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.

It sucks the joy out of it because to the extent that you build something with AI, (Obama voice) you didn't build that. I am allergic to the concept of developing with AI, especially for personal work, because AI-authored code isn't something I built, it's something I commissioned. It's like if I went onto Fiverr or Upwork with a spec and paid money and said "Here, build this" to a freelancer and then went back and forth with that person to correct and refine the result. I might get a halfway decent result in the end, but I don't get the experience of solving the problem myself. Experience solving problems yields new insights. It's why math textbooks have exercises: the only way to grasp the concepts is to solve problems with them.

With AI, you are no longer a developer, you're a product manager, analyst, or architect. What's neat about this, from a business perspective, is that you can in effect cut out all your developers and have a far smaller development workforce consisting of only product managers, analysts, and architects whom you call "developers" and pay developer salaries to. So you save money twice: once on dev workforce downsizing, and again on the pay grade demotion.

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

#86

Post by exceptione »

mr_mitm wrote: post #58

Same here. Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious. I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work.…

I can understand you don't want to spend effort for throwaway code.

  >  in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.
That isn't going to cut it. You need to understand the problem domain, have a deep design taste to weigh current and future demands, form a conceptually coherent solution, formalize it to code, then feed back from the beginning. There is no prompt giving your AI those capabilities. You end up with mediocre solutions if you settle for understanding every line it spits out. To be fair, many programmers don't have those capabilities either, so it also a question of quality expectations.

I believe you can use LLMs as advanced search and as a generator for boilerplate. People liking it easy are also being easy with quality attributes, so anyone should be self aware where they are on that spectrum.

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

#88

Post by exceptione »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #83

[flagged]

  > Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.
True, as a threat to PM. Product management can't vibe their way out from a lack of domain expertise.

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

#89

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

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…

love to hear about what tech is like on farms today. do you run into the problems with fixing tractors and equipment and its all locked down with drm and you cant fix it without hacking the software?

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

#90

Post by keyle »

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 :(

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.

Post reply on HN