We mourn our craft • Hacker News Board

Re: We mourn our craft

#441

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #408

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97 it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far. Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier. Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine. It’s not even close. This “I’m a victim because my softw…

it's an exciting time, things are changing and changing beyond "here's my new javascript framework". It's definitely an industry shakeup kind of deal and no one knows what lies 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from now. It makes me anxious seeing as i have a wife+2 kids to care for and my income is tied to this industry but it's exciting too.

Well you need to learn to adapt quickly if you have that much infrastructure to maintain

Re: We mourn our craft

#442

Post by _aavaa_ » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #425

_aavaa_ wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of local models has increased significantly since this time last year. As have the options for running larger local models.

The quality of local models is still abysmal compared to commercial SOTA models. You're not going to run something like Gemini or Claude locally. I have some "serious" hardware with 128G of VRAM and the results are still laughable. If I moved up to 512G, it still wouldn't be enough. You need serious hardware to get both quality and speed. If I can get "quality" at a couple tokens a second, it's not worth bothering. T…

Good by what standard? Compared to SOTA today? No they're not. But they are better than the SOTA in 2020, and likely 2023.

We have a magical pseudo-thinking machine that we can run locally completely under our control, and instead the goal posts have moved to "but it's not as fast as the proprietary could".

Re: We mourn our craft

#443

Post by Revanche1367 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #409

esafak wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !

I’ll believe it when coding agents can actually make concise & reusable code instead of reimplementing 10 slightly-different versions of the same basic thing on every run (this is not a rant, I would love for agents to stop doing that, and I know how to make them - with proper AGENTS.md that serves as a table of contents for where stuff is - but my point is that as a human I don’t need this and yet they still do for…

In my experience they can definitely write concise and reusable code. You just need to say to them “write concise and reusable code.” Works well for Codex, Claude, etc.

Re: We mourn our craft

#444

Post by cmiles74 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

dazhbog wrote: post #430

I dont get the hype.. And I dont think we will reach peak AI coding performance any time soon. Yes, watching an LLM spit out lots of code is for sure mesmerizing. Small tasks usually work ok, code kinda compiles, so for some scenarios it can work out.. BUT anyone serious about software development can see how piece of CRAP the code is. LLMs are great tools overall, great to bounce ideas, great to get shit done. If yo…

I have junior people on my team using Cursor and Claude, it’s not all great. Several times they’ve checked in code that also makes small yet breaking changes to queries. I have to watch out for random (unused) annotations in Java projects and then explain why the tools are wrong. The Copilot bot we use on GitHub slows down PR reviews by recommending changes that look reasonable yet either don’t really work or negatively impact performance.

Overall, I’d say AI tooling has maybe close to doubled the time I spend on PR reviews. More knowledgeable developers do better with these tools but they also fall for the toolings false confidence from time to time.

I worry people are spending less time reading documentation or stepping through code to see how it works out of fear that “other people” are more productive.

Re: We mourn our craft

#445

Post by charcircuit » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

stack_framer wrote: post #400

charcircuit wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's utility was never "six months away," 6 months ago is when my coding became 100% done by AI. The utility already has been there for a while. >I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible. The difference is that you were a kid then with an open mind and now your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works and how things should be done.

> your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works Yeah, it's weird. I'm fixated on not having bugs in my code. :)

AI can help with that too by automatically fixing bugs.

Re: We mourn our craft

#446

Post by ok123456 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

faccacta wrote: post #37

I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.

This is romanticising the past.

The modal person just trying to get their job done wasn't a software artisan; they were cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, using textbook code verbatim, and using free and open-source code in ways that would likely violate the letter and spirit of the license.

If you were using technology or concepts that weren't either foundational or ossified, you found yourself doing development through blog posts. Now, you can at least have a stochastic parrot that has read the entire code and documentation and can talk to it.

Re: We mourn our craft

#447

Post by bopbopbop7 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #305

grahar64 wrote: post #7

"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.

Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.

Maybe we should look at output like quality of software being produced instead of discourse on forums where AI companies are spending billions to market?

Where is all this new software and increased software quality from all this progression?

Re: We mourn our craft

#448

Post by apitman » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

ctmnt wrote: post #436

apitman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and sp…

I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.

A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std.

All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.

Re: We mourn our craft

#449

Post by advael » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

NeutralCrane wrote: post #416

terminalbraid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days. Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail. 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have…

I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis.

I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again

Re: We mourn our craft

#450

Post by cmiles74 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

koiueo wrote: post #171

> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me. We'll still be sitting till 2am. > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. I've been hearing t…

I am not confident that AI tooling can diagnose or fix this kind of bug. I’ve pointed Claude Opus at bugs that puzzle me (with only one code base involved) and, so far, it has only introduced more bugs in other places.