We mourn our craft • Hacker News Board

Re: We mourn our craft

#291

Post by terminalbraid » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

janderland wrote: post #139

zamalek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?

The people outside of us didn’t care about your beautiful code before. Now we can quickly build their boring applications and spend more time building beautiful things for our community’s sake. Yes, there are economic concerns, but as far as “craft” goes, nothing is stopping us from continuing to enjoy it.

I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae, sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all of it). That's part that I mourn.

Re: We mourn our craft

#292

Post by frays » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

The majority of the code currently running in production for my company was written 5+ years ago. This was all "hand-written" and much lower quality than the AI generated code that I am generating and deploying these days.

Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best.

If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to rewrite this code myself all over again.

Re: We mourn our craft

#293

Post by flowerbreeze » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #241

lp4v4n wrote: post #11

People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming. If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language. But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all. So here we're seeing yet another text about…

You're right, of course, but you should consider that all formal language starts as an informal language idea in the mind of someone. Why shouldn't that "mind" be an LLM vs. a human?

I think mostly because an LLM is not a "mind". I'm sure there'll be an algorithm that could be considered a "mind" in the future, but present day an LLM is not it. Not yet.

Re: We mourn our craft

#294

Post by whyenot » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money. That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open source projects that would love to have your help, but the days of making big money may be drawing to a close.

Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#295

Post by terminalbraid » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #120

zamalek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?

I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner. Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almos…

> AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants

It only sounds like music.

Re: We mourn our craft

#296

Post by bopbopbop7 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #268

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software > The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering. Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts are telling you.

It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.

> Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code

It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity from them?

Re: We mourn our craft

#297

Post by kelnos » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #192

fastasucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

That's just gatekeeping. It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now. Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet. But my craft was not typing. It's coding. If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.

A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)

Re: We mourn our craft

#298

Post by Nextgrid » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

AstroBen wrote: post #257

Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long

Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe.

It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.

Re: We mourn our craft

#299

Post by hnlmorg » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems.

Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did.

And software that’s open and can be modified.

Instead what we have is:

- AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason.

- perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.

- hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand

- operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security”

- and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth.

The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#300

Post by Brian_K_White » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

XenophileJKO wrote: post #91

wlindley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.

And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.

And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.

But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.

I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.

I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)

It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.

And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.