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

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

#261

Post by jerich »

JimBlackwood wrote: post #82
hackersk wrote: post #6

[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…

I’m the same way; I feel like Claude is doing more than just writing code, it’s getting me unstuck.

I’ve been pulling projects out of the closet that have been sitting there for years. It’s because I can sit down and get started so seamlessly. Before, I might waste the first couple hours configuring my environment and tool setup, but with Claude Code I can just jump in and start building, start solving the real problem.

I just built something this week where I had the parts sitting in my closet for a couple years, but just got curious to see how Claude does with embedded C, so it got me started. (Turns out Claude scanned my drive and found an abandoned C project that was outside my usual DEV folder, and just built on that). The code was 5% of the project, but it got done because Claude Code gave me the momentum push.

For my personal projects, the last 3 weeks have been more productive than the last 3 years.

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

#263

Post by jascha_eng »

cornholio wrote: post #41
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

You are putting sentences together just like an LLM would - quite fitting for an AI generated article. You might want to get it checked out, these days you never know if you are a real person or not.

because it is an LLM account or at least someone responding by putting things through an LLM first im pretty sure. Reported it already earlier today somehow not banned. I guess HN is a bit dead, considering how many people are upvoting this slop.

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

#264

Post by Majromax »

sarchertech wrote: post #199
zozbot234 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dug into the code and it was thousands of lines of absolute madness Ask the AI to assess the code itself and to propose ways to gradually refactor it for better cleanliness. It can be good at that stuff, but you need to make it an explicit goal.

Yeah I tried that but without tests it couldn’t keep the look and feel the same. And spending time thinking deeply enough about it to understand and specify what exactly I don’t want it to change just goes back to my point that coding isn’t the hard part.

Prompting all the way down? Have the AI create tests that document existing, known-good behaviours, then refactor while ensuring those tests pass.

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

#265

Post by nunez »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #258
nunez wrote: post #256

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew…

Or maybe people who liked writing code also like writing prompts to write code? And yes, there are also traditionalists who think the old ways are the best ways.

It's not about "best" or "traditional," though your bias is clearly set.

"Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it.

(It's doubly-ironic for me, as I actually like writing documentation!)

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

#266

Post by necovek »

danans wrote: post #223
hypfer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? Yes. > The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software. No. The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why n…

> The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift. If you have the time tona scratch your own itch and gift the results, it implies you have a source of income that gives you the time/lifestyle to do such a thing. You might be a…

You think there won't be students or academics anymore? Arguably, most non-corporate-supported (when that became a thing) FOSS was created by students and academics.

So what is really changing?

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

#268

Post by timmytokyo »

RevEng wrote: post #169
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.

Yes and no. LLMs take all the writing on the Internet (good and bad) and average it out. It's similar to the way generative AI images always have an identifiable, artificial "look". They've averaged out the personality and thereby erased the individuality that went into the efforts the original artists used to create them.

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

#269

Post by nunez »

Deegy wrote: post #138
mark-r wrote: post #114

There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them with got more sophisticated too and suddenly you're producing 100x more.

And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be

And the only people who could afford to tractor at scale are Cargill/Monsanto who bought out most of the small/medium-sized farms while leaving farms that didn't take the offer to slowly die...

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

#270

Post by 0xcafefood »

amelius wrote: post #45
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.

Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Maybe this is not entirely true yet, but it most likely will be in the near future.

Managers' jobs are more at risk here than the engineers'.
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