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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

#131

Post by Eufrat »

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.

You’re forcing a binary choice here.

I think for a lot of minor things, having AI generate stuff is okay, but it’s rather astounding how verbose and sometimes bizarre the code is. It mostly works, but it can be hard to read. What I’m reading from a lot of people is that they’re enjoying coding again because they don’t have to deal with the stuff they don’t want to do, which...I mean, that’s just it isn’t it? Everyone wants to work on what they enjoy, but that’s not how most things work.

Another problem is that if you just let the AI do a lot of the foundational stuff and only focus on the stuff that you’re interested in, you sometimes just miss giant pieces of important context. I’ve tried reading AI driven code, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it’s just unextensible nonsense that superficially works.

This isn’t tech that should replace anything and needs to be monitored judiciously. It can have value, but what I suspect is going to happen is we are going to have a field day with people fixing and dealing with ridiculous security holes for the next decade after this irrational exuberance goes away. It should be used in the same way that any other ML technique should be. Judiciously and in a specific use case.

Said another way, if these models are the future of general programming, where are the apps already? We’re years into this and where are they? We have no actual case studies, just a bunch of marketing copy and personal anecdotes. I went hunting for some business case studies a while ago and I found a Deloitte “case study” which was just pages of “AI may help” without any actual concrete cases. Where are the actual academic studies showing that this works?

People claiming AI makes them code faster reminds me that Apple years ago demonstrated in multiple human interaction studies that the mouse is faster, but test subjects all thought keyboard shortcuts were faster [1]. Sometimes objective data doesn’t matter, but it’s amusing that the whole pitch for agentic AI is that it is faster and evidence is murky for this at best.

[1] https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

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

#132

Post by latexr »

lgvld wrote: post #107
risyachka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.)

> 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 always have a hard time taking this complaint seriously, because the solution is absolutely trivial. Write a snippet. Have you really been out there, year after year, rewriting the same shit from scratch over and over? Just make a snippet. Make it good and generic and save it. Whenever you need to do something repeated on a new project, copy it (or auto-expand if you use it that often) and adapt. Snippet managers are a thing.

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

#133

Post by closewith »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #111
closewith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If so, you should make all generated code your code, exactly in the form it needs to be according to your deep expertise. Is this also true of all third party code used by their solution? Should they make all libraries and APIs they use their own in exactly in the form it needs to be according to their deep expertise? If not, why not? If so, does this extend to the rest of the stack? Interpreters, OSes, drivers? If…

No. They don't need to maintain, debug and extend those libraries.

Well, what if one becomes unmaintained or has issues that only affect your project. Why is that uncontrolled code different to generated code? Is it specifically that it's generated?

This isn't a trick question, BTW. It's a genuine attempt to get to the rationale behind your (and the GP's) stance on this.

In particular, the GP said:

> Or to phrase it more succinctly: if you are in camp 2 but don't have the passion of camp 1, you are a threat for the long term.

That hints I think at their rationale, that their stance is based on placing importance on the parts of software development that they enjoy, rather than any logical basis.

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

#134

Post by voidUpdate »

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.

I'm starting to think that people don't want to be programmers anymore, they want to be managers who delegate their work to someone or something else, and then come back, critique the work, and do another loop

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

#135

Post by mr_mitm »

latexr wrote: post #129
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.…

> 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…

> Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you.

No one is also keeping me from doing what I want to spend my time with on my days off.

> Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you?

No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects. What a weird question.

> 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.

I guess we have different definitions of "polished" then.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

latexr wrote: post #109
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.

> 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 you…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by kang »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #87
jackfranklyn wrote: post #83

[flagged]

>That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space. Feel like forums have turned into a grand Turing Test.

Turing Test is not really science (an infallible test, measurable outcome). An AI might never be able to pass TT for all humans. Just gets to be a high-def AI. Makes TT a technology.

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

#138

Post by lioeters »

000ooo000 wrote: post #112
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.

This false dichotomy comes up from time to time, that you either like dicking around with code in your basement or you like being a big boy with your business pants on delivering the world's 8000th online PDF tools site. It's tired. Please let it die.

"There are two kinds of programmers: those who love making programs, and those who love making money. I'm in the latter group."

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

#139

Post by porcoda »

I’m glad to see people finding coding accessible again. To me this kind of common “AI made coding fun and accessible again” message signals something deeper. As a field, we allowed our systems to get so complex that we lost people: and AI tools are bringing them back. Maybe we should look at how we have chosen to design systems and say “can these be made simpler and more accessible”? Even before AI systems I looked at my field with sadness: there is complexity growing everywhere and few people looking to address that. Instead, we seem to have incentivized creating complexity because new complicated systems that are hard to use lead to career advancement if you can point at something and say “I am one of the few who can deal with that” or “I created that complex thing”. The ability to handle the complexity makes an individual valuable even though the effect is it excludes many others.

Perhaps if we didn’t have deep layer cakes of frameworks and libraries, people would feel like they can code with or without AI. Feels like AI is going to hinder any efforts to address complexity and justify us living with unnecessary complexity simply because a machine can write the complex, hard to understand, brittle code for us.

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

#140

Post by closewith »

latexr wrote: post #109
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.

> 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 you…

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

I actually think this reveals more about you than you might realise. A _lot_ of people enjoy being able to help people resolve problems with their skills. Delivering value is marketing speak, but it's specifically helping people in ways that's valuable.

A lot of people who work in software are internally motivated by this. The act of producing code may (or may not be) also enjoyable, but the ultimate internal motivation is to hand over something that helps others (and the external motivation is obviously dollars and cents).

There is also a subset of people who enjoy the process of writing code for its own sake, but it's a minority of developers (and dropping all the time as tooling - including LLMs - opens development to more people).

> 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.

You can say the same thing about libraries, interpreters, OSes, compilers, microcode, assembly. If you're not flipping bits directly in CPU registers, your not pouring over every little detail to ensure perfection. The only difference between you and the vibe coder who's never written a single LoC is the level of abstraction you're working at.

Edit:

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

I also think this says maybe a lot about you, also, as many people also donate their time and efforts to others. I think it may be worth some self-reflection to see whether your cynicism has become nihilism.

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