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

calquio.com

141–150 of 460 posts

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

#141

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…

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

#142
post #75

Made with care for accuracy. I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.

This is more than just a bad side project - it's borderline malicious.

How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? Because if someone is on your website using your calculator, they are putting trust in you. If it's wrong, it could have downstream impacts on them. I hope every single one has a comprehensive set of tests with good edge cases. But realistically will they?

I'm actually pretty pro-AI development. But if you're going to use AI to help develop a website, at least focus on quality rather than quantity. AI makes quantity easy, but quality is still hard.

As an aside, the website doesn't even work for me. My clicks don't don anything.

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

#143
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.

yep, how do we define AI as a replacement for search engine, and templating engine, and inference engine (do X in Y)?

is there a term for that?

AI at our fingertips, accessible and useful, that's just a tool, that's not redefining us as an industry and denying people's jobs – that's an asset. (I used an em dash to prove I am not AI, as apparently double dash is now a sign of AI text!)*

(*) case in point, the situation is _TIRING_.

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

#144
post #132
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Or better yet, refactor your app so it doesn't require so much boilerplate - surely if you're doing the same thing over and over again you can just extract it into it's own function / method and abstract over it.

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

#145
post #84
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…

The problems I've been working on are at a much higher level than the nuts and bolts.

I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.

It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.

This is what I am exploring:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl

Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?

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

#146
post #136
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

#148
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…

> Your role shifted from "code writer" to "logic validator"

No it didn't, in fact, your job shifted from code writer to code fixer

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

#149

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 :(

Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)

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

#150
I think people would have reacted a lot more positively if you'd said right up front in the first line "hey look guys, yes I wrote this with ChatGPT but I am not a native English speaker so I've used AI to translate"

Otherwise it feels deceptive. Which is surprising given we should judge off intentions and not augmentation (like come on guys this is HN FFS).

This guy's not running any ads on the site, hasn't spammed with multiple posts that I've seen. I still think investment funds/modern stock exchanges are needless parasites upon society but that's just my opinion.

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