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

AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

ivanturkovic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 330 posts

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#161

Post by beej71 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #19
Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its 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.

I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs. Reading AI code is very pleasant. It's well annotated and consistent - how I like to read code (although not how I write code LOL). Reading language/opinions is not meant to be this way. It becomes repetitive, boring, and feels super derivative. Why would you turn the main way we communicate with each oth…

It's also because we (generally) consider a blog to be human communication and we consider math and programs to be something else.

If you're talking to someone on the phone and halfway through they identify themselves as a bot, surprising you, there's a profound sense of something like betrayal. A moment ago you were having a human connection, and suddenly that vaporized. You were misled and were just talking to an unfeeling robot.

And heartfelt writing is similar. We imagine the human at the other side of the screen and we relate. And when we discover it was a bot, no matter how accurate the sentiment, that relationship vanishes.

But with math and software, it's already sterile from a human connection perspective. It's there for a different purpose. Yes, it can be beautiful, but when we read it we don't tend to build a human connection with the coder.

An interesting exception is comments. When we read the fast inverse square root code and see the "what the fuck..." comment, we instantly relate to the person writing the software. If we later learned that comment was generated by an LLM, we'd lose that connection, again.

IMHO. :)

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#162

Post by Wobbles42 »

wreath wrote: post #85
Jasonleo wrote: post #33

AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.

We already knew this, but in the light of this AI hysteria we pretend like coding speed has always been the bottleneck

It's an extension of pretending that developer productivity can be measured in lines of code per day, as well as the managerial blindness to the fact that code can have negative value.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#163

Post by RivieraKid »

hypfer wrote: post #108
RivieraKid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.

Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place? This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.

Sure, AI replacing intelligence (simply speaking) is good for the society on average, but probably bad for me.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#164

Post by latexr »

dahart wrote: post #144
latexr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I find it… Amusing? That’s not quite the word. That programmers—a group notoriously for making wrong estimates of how long something will take to build—continuously and confidently spew a version of this. And it’s not even estimating how long we ourselves would take to build something, now we’re onto estimating what an undetermine…

It’s not an estimate, the point was that AI produced code multiples faster than the prompter, and the prompter is in a pretty good position to make that claim. I can confirm and make the same claim, so I believe that it’s true that for some tasks, Claude makes me 10x faster than on my own without AI, where 10x absolutely is a completely made up number that’s still true in spirit.

> It’s not an estimate

Yes, it is. “It would take a team 6 months” is an estimate, and I don’t see how you can argue it’s not. Even if it just said it would take them longer, that would still be an estimate.

> Claude makes me 10x faster than on my own without AI

Also an estimate.

> where 10x absolutely is a completely made up number

And by your own admission, an estimate taken from the ass that you thus cannot be certain is true. Made up perception does not equal reality.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#165

Post by Aurornis »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> I've shipped 7 side projects in the past year using AI heavily. But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased.

> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code.

Were you also shipping side projects every 2 months before AI?

If not, this comment just reads like cognitive dissonance. Your core claim is that AI has enabled you to ship 7 projects in 12 months, which presumably was not something you did pre-AI, right? So the AI is helping ship projects faster?

I agree that AI is not a panacea and a skilled developer is required. I also agree that it can become a trap to produce a lot of bad code if you’re not paying attention (something a lot of companies are going to discover in 2026 IMO)

But I don’t know how you can claim AI isn’t helping you ship faster right after telling us AI is helping you ship faster.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#166

Post by bcooke »

gedy wrote: post #99
ahokay wrote: post #71

This 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.

I originally thought AI-assisted writing would help synthesize what felt like original ideas I had, that I just wanted to get out there without the laborious task of editing. I didn't expect the writing to end up feeling so incredibly tired and watered-down, but upon more reflection on how the models actually work, it's not all that surprising. Uniqueness in writing is both in the style/structure and the message, and all AI seems to do is find the local maximum of both. Lately I've found myself going back to writing things myself (not all the time, depends on the task), and wishing there was a way I could just completely eliminate the slop from certain things I look at. I worry about all our minds, and the garbage-in, garbage-out net effect of this.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#167

Post by citizenkeen »

Aurornis wrote: post #165
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> I've shipped 7 side projects in the past year using AI heavily. But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased. > Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. Were you also shipping side projects every 2 months before AI? If not, this comment just reads like cognitive dissonance. Your core claim is that AI has enabled you to ship 7 projects in 12 mont…

For me, it allows me to ship more projects in parallel, but not any given project faster, which is how I take your parent’s comment.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#168

Post by bgentry »

Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

I think there's a big split between those who derive meaning and enjoyment from the act of writing code or the code itself vs. those who derive it from solving problems (for which the code is often a necessary byproduct). I've worked with many across both of these groups throughout my career.

I am much more in the latter group, and the past 12mo are the most fun I've had writing software in over a decade. For those in the first group, it's easy to see how this can be an existential crisis.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#169

Post by RevEng »

Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its 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.

LLMs write this way because people write this way. Maybe not everyone, but enough for it to train the models to do it. Much of my writing reads like an LLM wrote it, but that doesn't make me an LLM.
Post reply on HN