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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

#391

Post by abalashov »

sarchertech wrote: post #372
aenis wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 produ…

> 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.

This is quite true, and it is this -- really, a special case of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- that has me worried about the implications for the labour economy more than anything else.

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

#392

Post by llll_lllllll_l »

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…

do you think shifting careers is gonna make us to avoid AIshitfication? I thought that was spreading on all areas.

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

#393

Post by abalashov »

amunozo wrote: post #328
snarfy wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I immediately see the need for the opposite - perfect, accurate, proven bug free software. As long as there is AI there will be AI slop.

Well, there is no perfect, accurate, proven bug free software even before AI. Maybe the problem is not AI but economical incentives and lack of care.

The use of the words "perfect" and "proven" is perhaps a bit misplaced here, but accountability is a real question.

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

#394

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

Same for me... fortunately, I'm reaching the end of my career anyway. But let see how it goes. LLMs are a very recent development so it's too soon to take such drastic decisions.

On the positive side, I have some old personal projects I couldn't complete because it was too much work for me alone. I think LLMs will help for menial tasks, while I can still work on improving the design and adding features.

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

#395

Post by RomanPushkin »

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…

This is what Ruby, Rails and DHH personally tried to do for a long time. The concept of "One Person Framework" where one engineer could work on frontend/backend/devops/mobile stuff is kinda cool, and works to some degree. With questionable tools like Stimulus, but it's there. However, when you're one sentence away from 500-line react component, it's not relevant anymore.

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

#396

Post by bookofjoe »

elzbardico wrote: post #279
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…

Don't care about the critics. What you're doing is what people were doing in the 80s with their new PCs and tools that democratized this kind of development, like Basic and DBase. Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that…

See also: the fate of Stack Overflow. R.I.P.

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

#398

Post by seanw444 »

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.

Capitalism is the worst economic framework, except all the others.

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

#399

Post by ryandrake »

internet2000 wrote: post #336
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…

> 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? It's not that programmers should've made tools with training wheels, but that the regular programmer tools exploded in complexity. Microservices, Kubernetes, etc. Not saying those don't have their places, but they've made programming less a…

A lot of these complex tools exists for the sake of their own complexity--to allow engineers to keep building their resumes by continually increasing the depth of their development stacks. Regular programming CAN often use one CPU and fit into one machine's RAM, but we've all collectively decided to add 12 layers of abstraction, virtualization, and orchestration on top of them so they can be run on clusters full of machines instead. We're making our own profession less approachable for the sake of our resumes and careers.

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

#400

Post by laichzeit0 »

jakewindle47 wrote: post #315
shelled wrote: post #204

I, on the other hand, am getting gradually, but strongly, disillusioned, and importantly also feeling disenfrenchised, from coding and the world around it.

I too am feeling this way. I liked the deep engagement and flow state that came at least to me through actually typing out my program and having to deeply think about things.

I’m sure programmers who wrote their code on punch cards felt the same. Then programmers who wrote in assembler felt the same about high-level languages and optimising compilers.
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