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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

#201

Post by tonyedgecombe »

latexr wrote: post #163
closewith wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have spent over a decade working primarily on open-source, for free. I still do it, thought it’s no longer my primary activity. A huge chunk of that time was helping and tutoring people. That I still do and I’m better at it; I still regularly get thank you messages from people I assisted or who use the tools I build. I did use to volunteer at a food bank, but I used that example only because it’s quick and simple,…

>I have spent over a decade working primarily on open-source, for free.

How do you feel about the fact that OpenAi et al have slurped up all your code and are now regurgitating it for $20/month?

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

#202

Post by meetingthrower »

puilp0502 wrote: post #179
meetingthrower wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - w…

I think the parent is talking about the people who post to LinkedIn that "SWE as a profession is dead" non-stop. I fully agree with you that it massively lowered the cost to create, but I'd argue that the people who's saying that SWE is dead wouldn't be able to go past the complexity barrier that most of us are accustomed to handling. I think the real winners would be the ones with domain expertise but didn't have th…

Correct. I think "real" software requires real development and architecture.

And to be honest, even the tiny apps I'm doing I wouldn't have been able to do without some background in how frontend / backend should work, what a relational database is, etc. (I was an unskilled technical PM in the dotcom boom in the 2000s so at least know my way around a database a little. I know what these parts of tech CAN do, but I didn't have the skills to make them do it myself.)

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

#203

Post by hexbin010 »

meetingthrower wrote: post #193
hexbin010 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A miracle! Tell us more! What kind of apps? How has it helped revenue?

Two examples: 1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day 2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 h…

Awesome! Fully tested? QA'd? No false positives etc?

I wouldn't want to hassle customers who have fully paid up accounts

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

#205

Post by retired »

bko wrote: post #198
retired wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> artisanal code That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.

[dead]

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

#206

Post by bravetraveler »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #197
bravetraveler wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just work here, man. What's all this 'love' stuff? :) I propose a third camp: skilled employee seeking compensation. edit: to stay on the larger topic, I haven't been swayed much one way or the other. ~90% of the code I need existed a decade ago in the form of reusable modules. Anything new is closer to pseudo-code, an amplifier or sandbox isn't something I'm that interested in.

I propose a fourth, unskilled employee seeking compensation.

How could I forget the largest group?!

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

#207

Post by margorczynski »

viking123 wrote: post #182
7777332215 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 physic…

I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would b…

Why do people assume what currently available is the ceiling, especially after the last 2-3 years of explosive growth?

Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?

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

#208

Post by solumunus »

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…

Nonsense. Features are requested from me, I deliver them to the customer, the customer is happy and pays me. I deliver solutions and the customer deems them to be value for their business... What else am I supposed to call that?

I'm extremely diligent around vetting all code in my repo's. Everything is thoroughly tested and follows the same standards that were in my codebase before the invention of LLM's. I'm not "vibe coding". You're making assumptions because of your negative emotional reaction to LLM's.

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

#209

Post by graykey31 »

Aromasin wrote: post #183
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'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 i…

How do I get started with FPGAs? Coming from backend/ops/sysadmin

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

#210

Post by ojr »

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 don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.
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