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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

#371

Post by jakewindle47 »

krisgenre wrote: post #366
jakewindle47 wrote: post #330

LLMs 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.

For me, it was the craft that was fun, less the building. It was nice to have a really good result that customers were happy about, that other engineers were happy about, but it was also nice to have such intimate knowledge of a codebase because I and my team built it.

I miss that level of mastery. I feel that in the LLM-assisted coding age, that's now gone. You can read every section of code that an LLM generates, but there's no comparison to writing it by hand to me in terms of really internalizing and mastering a codebase.

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

#372

Post by sarchertech »

aenis wrote: post #353
sarchertech wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself. I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5. If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code. Yup, my conclusion exactly. With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant cod…

The thing is good code doesn’t cost more than bad code in the long run. In many cases it doesn’t even cost more in the short run. And it usually has nothing to do with being manicured or elegant.

A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems.

A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system.

Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.

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

#373

Post by 1970-01-01 »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

That's a great take. The duality between hobby code and employable skills is striking. For a very long time you could transition into it, but I don't think so anymore. The job market demands X+Y+Z, so you need to know and follow X+Y+Z or you're not doing anything productive (hobby coding). Insane.

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

#374

Post by g947o »

vips7L wrote: post #345
g947o wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I have so many things to say about the site, but have been withholding them in fear of "posting shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work"

Is it a shallow dismissal if the work doesn’t work?

Whether the dismissal is shallow is in the eye of the moderator.

I have seen that before, so I am not going to touch that.

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

#375

Post by lithocarpus »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

The OP and the farmer are people who coded in the past. There can be a big difference between someone who understands how computers and code work generally, and someone who doesn't.

I was a software engineer up till about 8 years ago. I still dabbled in scripts here and there for things I needed since then. LLMs have proved hugely useful for me to do a wide variety of things that wouldn't have been worth bothering with before. The biggest barrier that LLMs overcome for me is being able to quickly find and adapt to different tools, libraries, languages, etc. But it does help immensely to understand how software works to some degree for being able to approach the problem in the first place. I think the two factors multiply together.

I imagine if I want to I could get back into real software engineering much easier and faster than I could have a few years ago, because I still understand how things work fundamentally, I'm just out of date on what's changed in libraries and systems and languages in the last 8 years.

It's also useful for working with spreadsheets and databases.

Anyway I don't mean to shill for LLMs, I hate where this all is taking civilization in general but I'll still use it where it helps me accomplish things I do value.

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

#376

Post by BeetleB »

wickedsight wrote: post #301
leoedin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.

Can you provide details on the bug?

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

#377

Post by 3vidence »

jakewindle47 wrote: post #370
vips7L wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scho…

Just wanted to say I've felt very similarly recently. Honestly feels like we need a place to continue to discuss post-tech career paths for mid-career engineers.

I've been considering becoming an electrician but it is also quite a career shift.

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

#378

Post by frumplestlatz »

zouhair wrote: post #311
phorkyas82 wrote: post #79

Slightly moving into the other direction, after 17 years of science and tech optimism I see myself turning into a Luddite more and more. First observation was that communication and social aspects of software seems crucial for success and proliferation. And next came: that technology seems inept to solve any socio-econimic problems, but rather aggravates them.

It's not technology that is the problem. It never was. It's Capitalism, always was the problem and always will. It's insane how Capitalism curtails innovation.

> It's insane how Capitalism curtails innovation.

There is an incredible irony in your typing that out on a device so advanced that it was beyond science fiction when I was growing up 40 years ago.

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

#379

Post by bwfan123 »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

> If LLMs are covering a gap here maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack (and subscriptions/rent) to solve simple, tractable problems?

I see this with every new technology stack. Way back, we had folks putting out browser "applets" to do the same things that could be done in excel. And then, we had these apps built in the cloud, in mobile, on ios/android, in react, on raspberry pi, on a gpu etc..etc.. ie, Simple apps reinvented with some new tooling. It is almost the equivalent of 'printf("hello world")' when you are learning a new language. This is not to undermine the OPs efforts, but I see it in the spirit of "learning" rather than that of solving a hard problem.

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