That looks sweet. It would be great to adjust for inflation based on predicted inflation rates over the period.
Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
121–130 of 460 posts
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#122Earlier 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…
> If so, you should make all generated code your code, exactly in the form it needs to be according to your deep expertise.
This is solved problem with any large, existing, older code base. Original writers are gone and new people come on all the time. AI has actually helped me get up to speed in new code bases.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#123Happy 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.
They're not that binary.
I like using my software engineering skills to solve people's problems. I don't do coding for it's own sake - there's always a thing I'm trying to implement for someone.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#124That looks sweet. It would be great to adjust for inflation based on predicted inflation rates over the period.
Great feedback, I'll add to dev pipeline.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#125I've lost the joy in programming, the only thing I'm good at, I now make horrible music, but at least I don't exist as the means to an end that I don't control.
I hear AI is better at music and poetry too. Go forth and prompt.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#126Well in my opinion there's nothing wrong with vibe-coding. You can completely use it to make your passion projects. I draw the line when people try to sell their vibe-coded project as something huge, putting people at the risk of potential security breaches while also taking money out of them. Every other day I see ads of companies saying "use our AI and become a millionaire", this kind of marketing from agentic IDEs…
Fair, but the threat model matters here. For a static mortgage calculator, the data leak risk is zero (if it's client-side). The risk here is different - logical. If the AI botches the formula and someone makes a financial decision based on that - that's the problem. For "serious" projects vibe coding must stop where testing and code audits begin
Yep including that too obviously, but OP isn't trying to market this I think, just sharing his passion project
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#127I use AI as a senior developer I ask questions to. It gives me an answer, which I can use on my work or not. Saved me days of work, but I couldn't be taken out (yet) of the loop because I'm still making the decisions...
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think vibe code isn’t good enough for real products? Just so long as you have tests that show it functions as expected, why does it matter?
I think once you are asking for people’s money you should know what is going on pretty thoroughly. But that’s just my two cents :)
> I think once you are asking for people’s money you should know what is going on pretty thoroughly.
If that’s the bar, there likely a ton of businesses that should shut down…
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#129Same 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.…
> 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 other people do what you do not enjoy.
> I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time
No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#130I never stopped developing but I find myself taking on a lot more side projects than I used to. The cost for doing those just dropped significantly. This enables me to prototype and pursue things that I previously wouldn't have.
I'm also now dealing with things that previously would have taken me too long to deal with. For example, I'm actually making a dent in the amount of technical debt I have to deal with. The type of things where previously I maybe wouldn't have taken a week out of my schedule to deal with something that was annoying me. A lot of tedious things that would take me hours/days now can get done in a few prompts. With my bigger projects, I still do most stuff manually. But that's probably going to change over the next months/year.
I'm mainly using codex. I know a lot of people seem to prefer Claude Code. But I've been a happy ChatGPT Plus user for a while and codex is included with that and seems to do the job. Amazing value for 20$/month. I've had to buy extra credit once now.
The flip side of all this is that waiting for AI to do it's thing isn't fun. It's slow enough that it slows me down and fast enough that I can't really multi task. It's like dealing with a very slow build that you have to run over and over again. A necessary evil. But not necessarily fun. I can see why a lot of developers feel like the joy is being sucked out of their lives.
Dealing with this pain is urgent. Part of that is investing in robust and fast builds. Build time competes with model inference in the time stuff takes. And another part is working on the UX of this. Being able to fork multiple tasks at once is hugely empowering. And switching between editing code and generating code needs to get more seamless. It feels too much like I'm sitting on my hands sometimes.