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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

#381

Post by dangus »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #110
skeledrew wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is. "Software engineering" doesn't matter to anyone except to software engineers. What matters is executing that idea that's been gathering dust for ages, or scratching that pain point that keeps popping up in a daily basis.

Software engineering matters very much to anyone who has ideas or pain points that are beyond the capabilities of a next-token prediction engine to solve.

Some day in the future, this could be a lot like saying “hand-building engines matters to employees at Aston Martin.”

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

#382

Post by qzw »

cube00 wrote: 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.

Did you miss the part where they generated tests too?! I mean what do you want, for him to actually review the code or something? That's what kills the love of coding, man.

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

#383

Post by TheRealPomax »

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…

As someone who was part of the "everyone should learn to code" movement, no, we didn't. We tried all kinds of stuff for a decade and none of it was actually any good, only the people who would have learned to make stuff anyway learned to make stuff. LLMs are radically different: despite their results being terrible, and only just starting to show that maybe that can be a little better than terrible with opus 4.5, they actually meet people who want to make something where they are: skilled folks can make highly complex things (with code quality that's just as good as before because they know how to take what the LLM gives them and make it better), and unskilled folks can make "that one thing they want to" (and the code quality if irrelevant because it's a one-off that's not going to be maintained).

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

#384

Post by ikidd »

dharmatech wrote: post #28
ikidd wrote: post #21

Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago. Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of featur…

Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?

The fleet task app has been really useful. I have my hired hands using it, tasks are shared and can be deferred so they don't show up until spring or midsummer when we have weather or time to work on them, or we're going to need that piece of equipment readied.

Honestly, I have so many features in it now it's hard to describe it, shared work calendar, parts shopping list, recurring maintenance, blah blah blah. It's very bespoke and I doubt anyone else would want to use it the way we do.

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

#385

Post by ikidd »

dharmatech wrote: post #26
ikidd wrote: post #21

Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago. Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of featur…

Did you start farming from scratch? Did you take over a farm?

Family farm I came back to after working out for years and sold my IT company.

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

#386

Post by RomanPushkin »

Worst engineer's nightmare would be if you're hired, delivered the "working website with 100 of different calculators", and someone like myself needs "just to code review it" and "make sure all corner cases are covered and stuff like that", and "provide constructive feedback" (that would be copy-pasted later on to AI), but mostly "this work is 99.9% complete". And you "can't understand why such a simple code review takes so much time, because everything just works for me".

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

#387

Post by abalashov »

dysoco wrote: post #319
abalashov wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec. There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made. There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all,…

> it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? Like 80% of jobs outside the USA are either local or outsourced CRUD web applications. Many people live quite well thanks to exchange rates. I wonder what's gonna happen if/when those jobs disappear.

That is concerning, as a matter of social problems.

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

#388

Post by ikidd »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #89
ikidd wrote: post #21

Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago. Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of featur…

love to hear about what tech is like on farms today. do you run into the problems with fixing tractors and equipment and its all locked down with drm and you cant fix it without hacking the software?

That's all blown way out of proportion. I have a stack of 10k page manuals for diagnosing and repairing every piece of green iron on the place. Honestly, I've been considering training an LLM so I can make better use of the manuals, they're so incredibly detailed it's hard to find the thing you're looking for.

The only thing Deere "locks down" is that some of the parts have a CANbus address that you need to get a tech over to program the controller to recognize the part, and do the same if you replace a controller.

It's not some nefarious anti-farmer thing, it's because of the way the controller network works. In fact, I've used a CANbus sniffer on the bus and everything on there is in the clear, they don't even encrypt the messages.

The only things I've sent to town to get fixed was because I didn't have time to diagnose it, or it was an insurance claim and I wanted warranty. Blowing $80,000 worth of innards out the back of a combine wasn't a job I wanted to tackle right then (but I probably should have, I wasn't happy with the attention to detail in the repair).

So the upshot is, don't believe every terrible story about Deere you hear. Just the one where they charge too goddamn much for parts.

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

#389

Post by abalashov »

newsoftheday wrote: post #351
abalashov wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec. There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made. There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all,…

>it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer Businesses don't pay for CRUD apps, businesses pay for apps that solve problems which often involves CRUD to persist their valuable data. This is often within the sometimes very strange and difficult to understand business logic which varies greatly from one business to another. That is what "CRUD app developers" actually do, so dismiss…

I really wasn't referring to domain-specific CRUD development of that sort, and tried to draw attention to the distinction with the word "middling", but perhaps it was a bit too subtle.

Why, I do plenty of what you describe myself...

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