[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.
Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!
Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
361–370 of 460 posts
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#362LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…
Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?
No the OP, but I feel like using LLMs to code is much more like management than coding. And the "person" you're managing is a not very smart coder with severe memory issues.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre. I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial? How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only…
The f is gas town?
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#364[deleted]
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#365Made 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 realist…
I built one of the top 3 results on Google when you search “compound interest calculator” and a dozen other similarly popular calculator pages.
The value isn’t the interface, it’s the trust that its calculations are accurate. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with accountants and finance people to validate all the calculations.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#366LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…
18 years here (more if I can count my non professional years). Agreed, coding isn't as much fun as it used to be but AI has only increased my enthusiasm for tech. Its a lot more easier to learn and understand new stuff, build things (especially personal tools) and tinker in any programming language.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk, your superiority complex about the whole issue does make it sound like you’re feeling threatened. You seem determined to prove that AI can’t really make any decent output. What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?
> What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise? I was correcting your misguided statement: > Their critics didn’t make that! by pointing out that we, among other things, build the libraries that you/Claude are copy-and-pasting from. When you make an assertion that is factually incorrect, and someone corrects you, that does not mean they are threatened.
Did you build a library?
If you did, did you put yourself in a clean room and forget about every existing library you’ve ever seen?
Have you made sure your code doesn’t repeat anything you’ve seen in a CS101 textbook? Is your hello world completely unique and non-identical to the one in the book?
When you write a song do you avoid using any chord progression that has been used by someone else?
LLMs are just doing a dumbed down version of human information processing. You can use one to make an app and tell it not to use any libraries. In fact, I’d argue that using an LLM negates the need for many libraries that mostly serve to save humans from repetitive hand-writing.
You can even tell AI to build a new library which essentially defeats your entire argument here. Are you trying to imply that LLMs can’t work at an assembly language level? I’m pretty sure they can because they’ve read every CS textbook you have and then some.
Will it be quality work? The answer to that question changes every day.
But the fact remains that you are indeed acting threatened. You’re not “correcting” me at all, because I didn’t claim that AI-assisted developers are doing anything in some kind of “pure” way.
My claim is that they’re seeing something they want to exist and they’re making it exist and putting it out there, while the vast majority of haters aren’t exactly out there contributing to much of anything in terms of “real software engineering.”
Imitation is a form of flattery. When something “copies” you and makes it better/cheaper/more customized, that’s a net gain. If AI is just a fancy copy machine, that functionality alone is a net benefit.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#368LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…
[dead]
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#369LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…
Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?
Many reasons
Everyone else is using LLMs to assist their development, which makes it a lot harder to work without them, especially in just building enterprise apps. It doesn't feel like I'm creating something anymore. Rather, it feels like a fuzzy amalgamation of all developers in the training data are. Working with LLMs sometimes feels like information overload. When I see so much code scrolling past as the agent makes its changes, this can be exhausting. Reading this massive volume of code is exhausting. I don't like that the new "power tools" of software engineering mean that my career, our career, is now monetizable. I liked feeling like a craftsman, and that is lost.
Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
#370LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years. As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my c…
What are you looking of shifting to? I’ve thought about an actual engineering discipline, but going through the schooling just seems too big of a thing.
Honestly? I'm not sure. I've looked at a few different paths.
I'm lucky to live in the Research Triangle area of the United States, so I've got really good options for schooling around me. My sister graduated with an aerospace engineering degree, and I've always been interested in space. Thinking about hardware as a possible path as well.
But in a complete twist, I've also always wanted to be an educator. A high school math or computer science teacher would fit me well. I remember a lot of my male teachers very fondly in terms of the impact they had on my life, and I'd love to give that back.