I quit. The clankers won • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#271

Post by qsera » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #239

zozbot234 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> describe the issue exactly in the way a human programmer would Human programmers don't usually hallucinate things out of thin air, AIs like to do that a whole lot. So no, they aren't working the exact same way.

> Human programmers don't usually hallucinate things out of thin air Oh, you wouldn't believe how much they do that too, or are unreliable in similar ways. Bullshiting, thinking they tested x when they didn't, misremembering things, confidently saying that X is the bottleneck and spending weeks refactoring without measuring (to turn out not to be), the list goes on. > So no, they aren't working the exact same way. Ho…

That is not hallucinating...

LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time. Mainstream media only calls it "hallucination" when the output is wrong, but from the point of view of a LLM, it is working exactly it is supposed to....

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#272

Post by bluecheese452 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

What about a company with high security reqs that do bot alloellms? Like gov type work.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#273

Post by nicksergeant » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

JustResign wrote: post #228

anovikov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I never had patience to figure how to build a from-scratch iOS app because it required too much boilerplate work. Now i do, and i got to enjoy Swift as a language, and learned a lot of iOS (and Mac) APIs.

But it isn't "from scratch", is it? It's "from Claude".

If you build a house from scratch but you didn't mill the lumber, did you build it from scratch?

If you make a pizza from scratch but you used canned sauce was it from scratch? What if you used store bought dough? What if you made the sauce and the dough but you didn't grow the tomato?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#274

Post by PurpleRamen » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #262

PurpleRamen wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain a bit more? With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

I mean the comment says "contract" right there; you can easily be on a contract with multiple companies simultaneously. When I was freelancing full-time ca. 2010-2013 or so I often had 5-6 active contracts running simultaneously. I probably worked for 15-20 different companies total in that 3-4 year span.

Yes, likely, but make even less sense, as you can't except support for education as a freelancer. I mean a freelancers whole purpose is to sell skill and be gone when the job is finished. You are from the beginning just an expendable tool they don't want to polish outside the scope of the job.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#275

Post by shagie » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

ojbyrne wrote: post #235

tasuki wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.

Consider the rate of job hopping that would be evident on that resume. I'm not sure how many companies would be willing to invest in sending a FTE who stays somewhere for likely less than a year to a conference or say "Ok, you an spend 20% of your time improving your skills."

What is more likely with the 35 number is that these are multiple simultaneous contracts. When working as a contractor you're fixing that problem or that project. The company isn't going to have you around for longer than a month after it's been fixed and documented.

There's no reason to spend company resources on training a person any more than there's reason for you to pay a plumber to be reading "learn to be an electrician in 10 days" while they're supposed to be working on fixing the sink or doing the plumbing for new construction.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#276

Post by falkensmaize » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #183

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

> This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? If it does go as far that way as many seem to expect (or, indeed, want), then most people will be able to do it, there will be a dearth of jobs and many people wanting them so it'll be a race to the bottom for all but the lucky few: development will become a mi…

What the people excited about the race to the bottom scenario don’t seem to understand is that it doesn’t mean low skill people will suddenly be more employable, it means fewer high skill people will be employable.

No one will be eager to employ “ai-natives” who don’t understand what the llm is pumping out, they’ll just keep the seasoned engineers who can manage and tame the output properly. Similarly, no one is going to hire a bunch of prompt engineers to replace their accountants, they’ll hire fewer seasoned accountants who can confidently review llm output.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#277

Post by Bridged7756 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

catlifeonmars wrote: post #117

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generate…

In the future Claude will keep a tight ship on dissenters. If your monthly quota doesn't exceed the 10k worth of tokens your employer will be notified and you will be flagged as a "dissenter". Your lease will be cancelled, because who would trust someone ignorant enough to not use LLMs in their daily life, and you'll be vetoed from the field for life, for clanker companies will proclaim that anyone who doesn't use LLM-assisted coding should be culled and so they'll run a tight ship.

And executives will get millions in bonuses for figuring it out, and the remaining programmers, probably one or two, will raise their necks over who's the best prompter and how everyone else was dumber than them for not figuring it out.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#278

Post by trollbridge » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #231

mikkupikku wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working , as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does…

> Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing. One might argue that this is a substitute for metaprogramming, not software developers.

It's interesting more people haven't talked about this. A lot of so-called agentic development is really just a very roundabout way to perform metaprogramming.

At my own firm, we generally have a rule we do almost everything through metaprogramming.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#279

Post by xeromal » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

mcdeltat wrote: post #143

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I think your argument is predicated on LLM coding tools providing significant benefit when used effectively. Personally I still think the answer is "not really" if you're doing any kind of interesting work that's not mostly boilerplate code writing all day.

How much of software programmer work is interesting? A fraction of a percent? I'd argue most of us including most startups work on things that help make businesses money and that's pretty "boring" work.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#280

Post by prplfsh » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.