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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

exceptione wrote: post #78
solumunus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be two camps of people: those who love the coding and those who love delivering value/solutions. I am in the latter camp. The happy consumer and the polished product is what gives me satisfaction, the code is just really a vehicle from A to B. It’s a shame for anyone in the first camp who wants a career.

Agree with those 2 camps. The latter camp is all cheered up which is nice, but they should be asking the question if their solution is valuable enough to be maintained. If so, you should make all generated code your code, exactly in the form it needs to be according to your deep expertise . If not, congratulations, you have invented throw-away code. Code of conduct: don't throw this code at people from the former cam…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by ivcatcher »

veunes wrote: post #92

The key phrase here is "I still had domain expertise". Many miss that AI is a multiplier. If you multiply 0 by AI, you get 0 (or hallucinated garbage). You multiplied your knowledge of compound interest and UX by AI's speed. Without your background, the AI would have generated a beautiful interface that calculates mortgages using a savings account formula. Your role shifted from "code writer" to "logic validator" - t…

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

#103

Post by olig15 »

ivcatcher wrote: post #19
chriskanan wrote: post #3

Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.

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This is a bot

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

#104

Post by skeledrew »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #40
dangus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to this: skills mean nothing if you don’t use them. OP made a site with a bunch of calculators. Their critics didn’t make that!

We're busy building real software, not toys. I routinely write all kinds of calculators in my game development, in addition to having 100x more complex code to contend with. This task is as trivial as it gets in coding, considering computers were literally made to calculate and calculation functions are part of standard libraries. OP definitely didn't use Claude to implement math functions from scratch, they just did…

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

"Software engineering" doesn't matter to anyone except to software engineers. What matters is executing that idea that's been gathering dust for ages, or scratching that pain point that keeps popping up in a daily basis.

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

#105

Post by retired »

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 quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day.

One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.

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

#107

Post by lgvld »

risyachka wrote: post #66
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.…

>> so much of it isn't fun at all thats why it was valuable. All things worth doing are hard.

He said fun, not easy. Sometimes it's precisely doing brainless stuff over and over again that becomes hard, like writing a template displaying a table of your results or implementing filter and pagination on a web app. I don't feel like I'm growing anymore when doing those things. Or even for some tests. Or when you need a Bash script automating menial stuff. (Still you could find new perspective on things.)

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

#108

Post by bpev »

solumunus wrote: post #59
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.

There seems to be two camps of people: those who love the coding and those who love delivering value/solutions. I am in the latter camp. The happy consumer and the polished product is what gives me satisfaction, the code is just really a vehicle from A to B. It’s a shame for anyone in the first camp who wants a career.

I've also noticed a kind of grouping like this. I've described them as the "Builders" and the "Solvers". Where the former enjoys the construction aspect of the code more, and the latter enjoys the problem/puzzle-solving aspect of code more. I guess it's more of a scale than a binary, since everyone's got a bit of both, but I think I agree that AI is more fun for the builders.

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

#109

Post by latexr »

solumunus wrote: post #59
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.

There seems to be two camps of people: those who love the coding and those who love delivering value/solutions. I am in the latter camp. The happy consumer and the polished product is what gives me satisfaction, the code is just really a vehicle from A to B. It’s a shame for anyone in the first camp who wants a career.

> those who love delivering value/solutions.

This is such marketing speak. The words mean nothing, they’re just a vague amalgamation of feelings. “Vibes”, if you will.

If you “love delivering value and solutions”, go donate and volunteer at a food bank, there’s no need for code at any point.

> The happy consumer and the polished product

More marketing speak. If you are using LLMs to write your code, by definition your product isn’t “polished”. Polishing means pouring over every detail with care to ensure perfection. Letting an LLM spit out code you just accept is not it.

The word you’re looking for is “shiny”, meaning that it looks good at a glance but may or may not be worth anything.

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

#110

Post by anonymous908213 »

skeledrew wrote: post #104
anonymous908213 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're busy building real software, not toys. I routinely write all kinds of calculators in my game development, in addition to having 100x more complex code to contend with. This task is as trivial as it gets in coding, considering computers were literally made to calculate and calculation functions are part of standard libraries. OP definitely didn't use Claude to implement math functions from scratch, they just did…

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is. "Software engineering" doesn't matter to anyone except to software engineers. What matters is executing that idea that's been gathering dust for ages, or scratching that pain point that keeps popping up in a daily basis.

Software engineering matters very much to anyone who has ideas or pain points that are beyond the capabilities of a next-token prediction engine to solve.
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