Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bitter Prediction

4zm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 189 posts

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#11

Post by mjburgess »

All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof.

The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter.

Why be a better carpenter? Because software engineering is not about hobby projects. It's about research and development at the fringes of a business (, orgs, projects...) requirements -- to evolve their software towards solving them.

Carpentry ("programming craft") will always (modulo 100+ years) be essential here. Powertools do not reduce the essential craft, they increase the "time to craft being required" -- they mean we run into walls of required expertise faster.

AI as applied to non-hobby projects -- R&D programming in the large -- where requirements aren't specified already as prior art programs (of func & non-func variety, etc.) ---- just accelerates the time to hitting the wall where you're going to shoot yourself in the foot if you're not an expert.

I have not seen a single take by an experienced software engineer have a "sky is falling" take, ie., those operating at typical "in the large" programming scales, in typical R&D projects (revision to legacy, or greenfield -- just reqs are new).

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#12

Post by hedgew »

>Why bother playing when I knew there was an easier way to win? This is the exact same feeling I’m left with after a few days of using Claude Code. I don’t enjoy using the tool as much as I enjoy writing code.

My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.

I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#13

Post by anovikov »

I can't see why it's a bitter prediction. It's an observation from all my life that boring, mind-numbing but high impact work makes the best money. Now smart people go into coding because it's a thrill, they enjoy doing it for the sake of it. Once this is no longer the case, these people will be out, and competition will become lower and there will be easier bucks to make.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#14

Post by M4v3R »

To me it’s the exact opposite. I was writing code for the past 20+ years and I recently realized it’s not the act of writing code I love, but the act of creating something from nothing. Over the past few months I wrote two non-trivial utility apps that otherwise I would most probably not write because I didn’t have enough time to do that, but Cursor + Claude gave me the 5x productivity boost that enabled me to do so, and I really enjoyed doing that.

My only gripe is that the models are still pretty slow, and that discourages iteration and experimentation. I can’t wait for the day a Claude 3.5 grade model with 1000 tok/s speed releases, this will be a total game changer for me. Gemini 2.5 recently came closer, but it’s still not there.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#15

Post by ignoramous »

jstummbillig wrote: post #6

I don't really see it. At least the article should address why we would not assume massive price drops, market adjusted pricing and free offerings, as with all other innovation before, that all lead to wider access to better technology. Why would this be the exception?

If that happens, I can see those programmers become their age's Uber drivers (low pay, low skill, unsatisfactory, gig workforce).

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#16

Post by zwnow »

M4v3R wrote: post #10
freb3n wrote: post #7

The financial barrier point is really great. I feel the same with a lot of points made here, but hadn't yet thought about the financial one. When I started out with web development that was one of the things I really loved. Anyone can just read about html, css and Javascript and get started with any kind of free to use code editor. Though you can still do just that, it seems like you would always drag behind the 'coo…

You still don’t need AI to write software, but investing in it will make you more productive. More money enables you to buy better tools, that was always true for any trade. My friend is a woodworker and his tools are 5-10x more expensive than what I have in my shack, but are also more precise, more reliable and easier to use. AI is the same, I would even argue it gives you a bigger productivity boost with less money…

Incredible take considering using AI robs new learners of off real learning. There is a reason lots of experienced devs are dropping it from their editors. Using AI will not make you a better dev, it simply accelerates you building a failing product faster, because ultimately you wont understand your own product. Most devs that use AI blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#19

Post by cardanome »

A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai.

Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash.

It also tracks with my own experience. Yes, cursor quickly helps me get the first 80% done but then I spent so much time cleaning after it that I have barely saved any time in total.

For personal projects where you don't care about code quality I can see it as a great tool. If you actual have professional standards, no. (Except maybe for unit tests, I hate writing those by hand.)

Most of the current limitation CAN be solved by throwing even more compute at it. Absolutely. The question is will it economically make sense? Maybe if fusion becomes viable some day but currently with the end of fossil fuels and climate change? Is generative Ai worth destroying our planet for?

At some point the energy consumption of generative AI might get so high and expensive that you might be better off just letting humans do the work.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#20

Post by nu11ptr »

M4v3R wrote: post #14

To me it’s the exact opposite. I was writing code for the past 20+ years and I recently realized it’s not the act of writing code I love, but the act of creating something from nothing. Over the past few months I wrote two non-trivial utility apps that otherwise I would most probably not write because I didn’t have enough time to do that, but Cursor + Claude gave me the 5x productivity boost that enabled me to do so,…

I've kinda hit the same place. I thought I loved writing code, but I so often start projects and don't finish once the excitement of writing all the code wears off. I'm realizing it is designing and architecting that I love, and seeing that get built, not writing every line of code. I also am enjoying AI as my velocity has solidly improved.

Another area I find very helpful is when I need to use the same technique in my code as someone from another language. No longer do I need to spend hours figuring out how they did it. I just ask an AI and have them explain it to me and then often simply translate the code.

Post reply on HN