Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

calquio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 460 posts

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

#421

Post by jakewindle47 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #406
jakewindle47 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

I’m curious if you’ve tried using these tools the other way. Whenever I’ve done experimenting I found the tab completion annoying and the agent got so much wrong I was basically fighting it at every step, but when I went back to VS Code and treated LM as a super fast inline stackoverflow—give me an example, look up this API, find my dumb syntax error—I could use it to support deep work/staying in the zone rather than…

I have, and it's entirely my own fault, but the way my brain works is I can't justify doing something slower than I possibly could with other tools. I'm not one to completely give in to vibe coding. I do still very manually drive the LLM when I work, but I don't even feel like learning tech anymore.

I can't help but ask myself, what's the point when learning another programming language, or another library, or another paradigm, when a lot of this information and knowledge is encoded in the model weights of the LLM

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

#422

Post by jakewindle47 »

batshit_beaver wrote: post #401
jakewindle47 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

What's stopping you from writing code by hand even today? I mainly use LLMs for researching and trying possible paths forward, but usually implement the suggested solution myself specifically so that I fully understand the code (unless it's a one-liner or so, then I let the LLM paste it in).

Because I can't justify it. While I do love the craft, and I can do this, I work with other people and I can't convince other people to not use LLMs to do their daily work. So, while I'll be writing things by hand and using the LLM to suggest which way to go, they'll be submitting PR after PR of AI-generated code, which takes much more of my time to review.

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

#423

Post by randcraw »

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 :(

Yep. After 40+ years in the business I chose to retire rather than madly pump out code using a robot. Sucked all the joy right out of the craft.

It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building.

It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.

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

#424

Post by dang »

olig15 wrote: post #115
dang wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't be hostile to newcomers. That's a way to destroy this place. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

These posts will destroy this place. Post your AI written tools if you like - fine, but using an LLM to reply to comments is just insulting, and will make this place a wasteland of LLM. I wouldn’t post this if I didn’t care about the usual good quality of the discussions on this site.

I appreciate and share your concern for the quality of HN! But there are much better ways to take care of that than aggression towards newcomers.

It's common for communities who feel that they're under attack to shoot-first-ask-questions-later when outsiders show up. This is itself a step towards community decline and has particularly bad side effects. We need to consciously avoid that here.

Most HN users don't want to see LLM-generated posts [1] or even LLM-filtered posts [2], and we share those views. But this is a long-term trend that we're all slowly learning how to navigate. Brutalizing noobs doesn't need to be part of that, and we should all be careful about not doing so—partly because it's wrong to treat others that way, and equally because it's necessary to the life of this community to welcome newcomers.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#425

Post by HendrikHensen »

ikidd wrote: post #384
dharmatech wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Is there any backend component? How do you know it's secure and you won't be hacked? Can you comment on the maintainability of the code?

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

#426

Post by leoedin »

signatoremo wrote: post #407
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 Would you be asking the same question if it's written without AI? How can any software be always working will all edge cases?

Yes of course. These are calculators - they are meant to reliably calculate things.

I think the difference is that building 60 interactive calculators manually would force you to do a lot of manual testing. If someone built up that many interactive calculators I would imagine a lot of attention has gone on each one. Why would they spend so much time on something and not test it?

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

#427

Post by lpcvoid »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #400
jakewindle47 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All those new, higher level languages required you to at least somewhat know what you're doing. LLM users rarely do, specially the kind of people who purely vibecode. This will end terribly.

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

#428

Post by lpcvoid »

cameronh90 wrote: post #403
RomanPushkin wrote: post #386

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 t…

Is it that much worse than reverse engineering poorly designed business processes that hang together with Excel spreadsheets and VBA macros?

Yes, since at least that was written by a human with some semblance of cognitive familiarity.

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

#429

Post by lpcvoid »

nunez wrote: post #308
voidUpdate wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to think that people don't want to be programmers anymore, they want to be managers who delegate their work to someone or something else, and then come back, critique the work, and do another loop

And this is exactly the problem. Developers are happily passing off their biggest valuable asset to, essentially, their replacements while, at the same time, convincing themselves that them playing the "ideas guy" or "conductor" roles is the real value they bring to the table. Like, get real! I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their s…

I wonder about this too. HN in 2026 is barely recognizable anymore from how it was even 10 years ago. So many people loving mindless slop, so many people arguing against hacking on something for the sake of it, so many people seemingly hate programming on here now... So weird to witness.

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

#430

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #331
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #321

>> The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck. While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for e…

Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers. The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content. For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash fr…

>> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.

In Bizarro World. In our world, enshitification of the internet is driven predominantly by ads. For example, click bait, more ads and sloppier cheap content are all motivated by the need to create ever more content in order to serve ever more ads.

In the same way, spam blockers don't cause more spam, vaccines don't cause more disease, eating fish deosn't cause more fires, etc.

Post reply on HN