For whatever it's worth -- I run my own product/company (software). I do all code by hand and don't use any AI.
When you get stuck, you google search/stackoverflow rather than asking an llm?
Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#142My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…
> What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing).
This is why I don’t understand why folks around here (that are employed) feel so enthusiastic about AI. We are going to be working more in a rush to produce stuff that we won’t be feeling as proud of as we did before AI. Unless you were in the profession for the money, the delights of crafting software simply go away and AI is pushing us closer to be just… well, I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Sure thing, if you are a CEO, this new state of things must be wonderful
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#143My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…
I didn’t know modern (2015-2026) software engineers were making such a strong distinction between “writing code” and “designing solutions”. It’s not the majority of engineers “design” and then hand over the implementation to others (at least Ive never seen that before).
From my experience, a typical software engineer needs to understand the business (e.g., knowing who your users are), design a solution (e.g., we probably need an event-driven arch right here) and write the code (e.g., we should use select for update skip locked to avoid over claiming). They all are equally challenging imho
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#144I think frontend will be dead in next years. Now, my company doesn't hire frontend developer. Our programmers write frontend with claude.
Even contracts are being drafted by AI, and managers are signing them. I've seen contracts signed using emojis, and the project has already begun.
We live in an interesting era...
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#145This is what I'm seeing at my company as well, "software development principles" are out the window. People have forgotten all about "Second System Syndrome" too, docs, tests, code, design - all LLM generated.
I don't like, I prefer to use Claude/Codex as an aide, not to let it take the wheel entirely but I don't really feel like I have much choice in the matter.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part. If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved fro…
Who hires “pure solution modelers”? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone like that.
Aren't they simply called "consultants"?
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#147My impression is that smaller companies, that depend on rapid prototyping to gain clients, exert a lot of pressure onto their devs to use LLMs. At least that's the situation in the companies some friends of mine are working at. I'm in a slow-moving, much bigger company. Lot's of talk about "AI" here and we can use copilot if we want to, but there is 0 pressure. I'm in a small team and one colleague uses copilot often…
Sadly, the folks vibe coding the massive projects also think that any technical debt created can also just be vibe coded away too...
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any code reviews? Or is AI reviewing code also?
We still review everything. And we guide by planning, prompting, speccing. So we're not actually much faster at the core code, because reviews still take time. Ultimately, we're on the finance markets and we have regulatory pressures and I, as the human, am responsible for putting the code out there. But we're freeing up a lot of time to get other things correct. We have n x more metrics now because plumbing in basic…
When you review everything, do you understand every line of code before approving? Do you make it rewrite code that is too abstract or unclear for future humans to understand? Does AI write the tests and do you review those with the same diligence?
I don't disagree that it's revolutionary in many ways, but I am seeing lots of companies make very costly mistakes by relying too heavily on AI without fully understanding the code it writes and without fact checking its outputs by a human.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#149"This is exactly why we built AINAScan — we found that AI-generated code passes all tests and 'works', but consistently produces the same 15 structural bugs: save functions that never write to DB, async functions with no await, parameters that have zero effect on return values. Linters miss all of these. The code looks fine until production."
I've found they optimize largely for the happy path and don't consider any (or enough) edge cases (e.g. what happens to everything downstream of this, if say, there's a timeout in this specific HTTP request.)
I find Claude fighting me when I point out things like that as well claiming its not worth it to worry about and when I point out the train wreck that would ensue by leaving some things in a weird state it flips its script: "I was incorrect about that..."
Folks will claim that's a skill issue but, its an issue letting the LLM run off without any oversight and it creates so much code you can't possibly review it all yourself, so like you've found, you hit a lot of problems in production.
AGENTS.md and friends help but I've found it ignoring rules in their as well, often and very frequently.
Personally what I've found to be the biggest win is:
1. Use AI to go harder not faster - use it for code reviews, second opinions, researching all the angles to a deep topic, but don't use it to pump out a whole app. Don't outsource your entire understanding to it (which is precisely what we do at my job today...)
2. Use it for the boring tasks that are hard to get wrong and can be easily validated.
Oh and tests... I've seen so many completely useless tests being generated. Any valuable test that I've ever seen claude create came from me finding a bug or missed edgecase.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep saying things like > it's probably an issue with your usage of if > I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt > a skill/PEBKAC issue But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute. Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not fli…
What does a random bug in one LLM's frontend app have to do with learning how to do prompt engineering well?
Because it proves that even the greatest prompt-engineers in the world are unable to vibe code their way out of a simple bug. The fact that this example is a small, annoying, random bug that is relatively harmless does not mean that the next bug won't be as harmless or even as apparent.