THERE IS A NEARLY INFINITE DEMAND FOR SKEPTICAL AND COMFORTING TAKES ABOUT AI CODING
THE MARKET WILL FILL THAT VOID
IT DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
91–100 of 330 posts
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#92Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
It's funny how seemingly easy it is to tell articles like this have that AI generated whiff to them. The first bit that raised my suspicion was the "The Identity Crisis Nobody Talks About" headline. This "The x nobody talks about" feels like such a GenAI thing.
I hate it. I couldn't read much more after that.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#93fuck me another ai written post
it's all so fucking tiresome
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#94One problem I have seen IRL is AI deployment mistakes and IMO Vibe Coders need an IT/Dev Father Figure type to avoid these simple mistakes. Here is one example:
A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure' or not. He asked me to read the code and visit the site and provide my opinion.
The code was pretty reasonable. The DB schema was good. And it worked as expected. However, he routinely zipped up the entire project and placed the zip files in the web root and he had no index file. So anyone who navigated to the website saw the backups named Jan-2026.backup, etc. and could download them.
The backups contained the entire DB, all the project secrets, DB connection strings, API credentials, AWS keys, etc.
He had no idea what an 'index' file was and why that was important. Last I heard he was going to ask Claude how to secure it.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#95[flagged]
> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build. For me, this is a bit different. Writing code has always been the bottleneck. I get most of my joy out of solving edge cases and finding optimizations. My favorite projects are when I’m given an existing codebase with the…
Fascinating- I've always loved the big picture, architecture, and I've also loved stable software but have one hell of a time fixing bugs. AI helped me a ton with that.
Well if you're ever in need for a complementary mind in side projects- huh, how does one connect over HackerNews?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#96> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written
Why is AI such a bad writer? Phrasing like this feels like reading Fox News.
To be honest it still feels crazy that AI is a writer at all. But yeah, not a good one
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#97> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it...
A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey.
The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then implement the technical requirements into a tangible feature or product.
The only reason companies buy software is because the alternative means building in-house, and for most industries software is a cost-center not a revenue generator.
I don't pay (US specific) 200K-400K TCs for code monkeys, I pay that TC for Engineers.
And this does a disservice to the large portion of SWEs and former SWEs (like me) who have been in the industry because we are customer-outcome driven (how do we use code to solve a tangible customer need) and not here to write pretty code.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that there's nothing to be written there "instead", it just is not needed text that is added to make the text longer, typical of AI writing that parrots the same points over and over to make up for word count. Here's another example from the blog: > Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not m…
One of the good book about writing I read was William Zinsser's "On Writing Well". Striving for simplicity and avoiding clutter was the two first principles described in the book. AI writing feels more like ramblings than communication.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about florid and elaborate writing (e.g. Faulkner, Lispector, Mieville, Mossman, Joyce, Austen, etc)?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#99This article is obviously written by ai and it’s just painful for me to read ChatGPT’s writing style day in and day out
I've unfortunately stopped reading articles before reading comments here as it's all mostly garbage now. I'm not sure what people are trying to accomplish with generating blogs aside from either clout farming or marketing for their companies.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#100[flagged]
We need to have more metrics for this. Like I hear people making this claim on HN all the time as if they know absolutely for sure but I doubt it's this simple.
I can guarantee you this... the story is not absolute. Depending on who you are and what you need to work on dev time could be slower, same or faster for you. BUT what we don't know is the proportion. Is it faster for 60% of people? 70%, 80%?
This is something we don't know for sure yet. But i suspect your instinct is completely wrong and that 90% of people are overall faster... much faster. I do agree that it produces more bugs and more maintenance hurdles but it is that much faster.
The thing is LLMs can bug squash too. AND they are often much faster at it then humans. My agentic set up just reads the incoming slack messages on the issue, makes a ticket, fixes the code and creates a PR in one shot.