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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#591

Post by arrowsmith »

wesammikhail wrote: post #22
arrowsmith wrote: post #2

Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun. And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back. I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!

Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you. I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.

I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever.

To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been all-in on AI for close to a year now, and I have absolutely zero regrets.

I can't believe I used to _type code out by hand_. What a primitive world I grew up in.

Re: We mourn our craft

#592

Post by arrowsmith »

chetanahuja wrote: post #539

Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

> Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

Yes, at least according to ChatGPT:

"Compilers didn’t arrive to universal applause; they arrived into a world where a chunk of programmers absolutely believed the machine could not be trusted to write “real” code—until the productivity wins (and eventually the performance) became undeniable."

Damn that sounds familiar.

Re: We mourn our craft

#593

Post by Kye »

This is probably a good representative take for the view of people who assigned value to the coding part of building software. It's worth reading and saving, if only as an artifact to study.

Re: We mourn our craft

#594

Post by Levitating »

sumedh wrote: post #574
Levitating wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop o…

> Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. So similar to IBM in the 80s. Time for a scrappy little startup to disrupt the industry.

> So similar to IBM in the 80s

In 1980 IBM earned 3.56 billion dollars[1] (15 adjusted for inflation). Apple earned 416.16 billion in 2025, Alphabet 402.8 billion.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/17/business/earnings-ibm-net...

Re: We mourn our craft

#595

Post by bagacrap »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #447
Kiro wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't necessarily enhance or detract from software quality. You could use it for quality assurance or code health initiatives, but you'd have to prioritize that. Obviously it is hard to find a lot of humans who will (be allowed to) choose that over adding some new feature to satisfy the sales guys. And since you measure quality basically on vibes (how many times has this app crashed lately?) it probably takes a while to diffuse from commit to your consciousness. But I have seen it used for the purpose of quality, so I am cautiously optimistic.

Re: We mourn our craft

#596

Post by wtetzner »

chasd00 wrote: post #393
0x696C6961 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to use whatever tools you like.

> You're free to use whatever tools you like. this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.

You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...

Re: We mourn our craft

#597

Post by wtetzner »

nradov wrote: post #420
HendrikHensen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.

You're still allowed to program by hand. Even in assembly language if you like.

> You're still allowed to program by hand.

In fact, you'll probably be more productive in the long term.

Re: We mourn our craft

#598

Post by wtetzner »

hintymad wrote: post #516
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most stude…

I'm not sure we can draw useful conclusions from the Claude Code written C compiler yet. Yes, it can compile the Linux kernel. Will it be able to keep doing that moving forward? Can a Linux contributor reliably use this compiler to do their development, or do parts of it simply not work correctly if they weren't exercised in the kernel version it was developed against? How will it handle adding new functionality? Is it going to become more-and-more expensive to get new features working, because the code isn't well-factored?

To me this doesn't feel that many steps above using a genetic algorithm to generate a compiler that can compile the kernel.

If we think back to pre-AI programming times, did anyone really want this as a solution to programming problems? Maybe I'm alone in this, but I always thought the problem was figuring out how to structure programs in such a way that humans can understand and reason about them, so we can have a certain level of confidence in their correctness. This is super important for long-lived programs, where we need to keep making changes. And no, tests are not sufficient for that.

Of course, all programs have bugs, but there's a qualitative difference between a program designed to be understood, and a program that is effectively a black box that was generated by an LLM.

There's no reason to think that at some point, computers won't be able to do this well, but at the very least the current crop of LLMs don't seem to be there.

> and now they can churn out millions of code easily.

It's funny how we suddenly shifted from making fun of managers who think programmer's should be measured by the number of lines of code they generated, to praising LLMs for the same thing. Why did this happen? Because just like managers, programmers letting LLMs write the code aren't reading and don't understand the output, and therefore the only real measure they have for "productivity" is lines of code generated.

Note that I'm not suggesting that using AI as a tool to aid in software development is a bad thing. I just don't think letting a machine write the software for us is going to be a net win.

Re: We mourn our craft

#599

Post by joquarky »

Nextgrid wrote: post #481
munksbeer wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think can be done better, I either just do it myself or point it in the right direction. It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant, which is the part I love. As far as I can tell, what's not to love…

If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse l…

> as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with

Your use of the word "should" is pointing to some ideal that doesn't exist anymore.

In current actual reality, you do whatever your employer gives you to do, regardless of your job title.

If you have 40 years of broad development experience but your boss tells you to build more CRUD web apps or start looking for another job in the current ATS hell, then the choice whether to use coding agents seems obvious to me.

Re: We mourn our craft

#600

Post by wtetzner »

puchatek wrote: post #390
kaffekaka wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.

If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two. But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.

> legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it

Not to mention they could just sell it to the highest bidder, or simply use it to produce competition and put you out of business. Especially if you're using their service to do the development...

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