The Programmer Identity Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#301

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #114

jimbokun wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those tech-fetishists that came before you. Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?

State of the industry both short and medium term is that you want to be the one doing replacing vs being the one being replaced. Not great but this is where we are at. If you are say SRE there are myriad of companies working hard to eliminate SREs but they need experts to set shit up so that SREs are not needed. Same thing will cascade to other Tech work, some faster than others. Career-wise I think it is wise now to…

It's not an either-or. Doing the replacing with AI means that you're ripe for being replaced yourself. Indeed, what you do until then is likely to have a side effect of training the very model that eventually replaces you.

The real answer to this is collective action - unions etc - to push back against the lowering of the standards by our employees. But software engineers still seem to be broadly allergic to unions.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#302

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

whynotminot wrote: post #139

jimbokun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s simpler than that. It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than oth…

I get it, but fundamentally this is a forum discussing technology, and AI is part of that. Especially as it relates to software engineering. I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it. The collective whinging in every AI topic is both annoying and self-defeating.

This is hacker news, supposedly.

And vibe coding is pretty much diametrically opposite to the hacker ethos.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#303

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

0x457 wrote: post #274

Barrin92 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love is something that is achievable in our society, Which is why I stressed twice, including in the part you chose to quote, that I am talking about people who can achieve that. If you have to take care of your sick grandmother, you don't need to feel addressed. But if you did have the resources to choose a career, like many people who comment here, and you ended u…

> If you have to take care of your sick grandmother, you don't need to feel addressed. That's not what am I saying at all. Unless you have Stockholm syndrome about your job, it's very hard to find a well paying job that you can love.

It is much harder than it used to be, and the big reason why is because we've meekly accepted the slow enshittification of our craft in the past.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#304

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #88

codyb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, a lot of us aren't convinced reviewing 8 meals made by agents in parallel _is_ producing better food. And it also seems exceedingly wasteful to boot.

I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I really like using knives!"), not really about whether the food is better. I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k…

It's both. Speaking as a user, software quality was already declining before AI coding, but AI seems to have put that process on a fast track now (not the least because of all the top management drinking the Kool-Aid and deciding that they can replace the people they have with it).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#305

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 9:56 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #67

I think in a few years, we will realize that LLMs have impacted our lives in a deeply negative way. The relatively small improvements LLMs bring to my life will be vastly outweighted by the negatives. If LLM abilities stagnate around the current level it's not even out of the question that LLMs will negatively impact productivity simply because of all of the AI slop we'll have to deal with.

Let's be clear about one thing, though. LLMs are simply tools, which can be used for good or for bad. It's specific people who do and promote the latter - top management of tech companies, for example. It's those people who are creating the negatives in my life and who tank quality for the sake of "productivity". Point the finger and say it out loud. They shouldn't be able to hide behind the tech.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#306

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

protontypes wrote: post #54

defgeneric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.

Maybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.

It's very easy to type on macOS, not to mention auto-substitution that many apps have (and these days this extends to web browsers).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#307

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #240

psunavy03 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are. It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

It doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.

They weren't "relatively rarely seen". If you have seen a Word document, chances are good that it had em-dashes in it simply because it would often autocorrect to that. In the Apple ecosystem, this sort of autocorrect is provided by the OS itself, so it extends to a lot more content produced.

I'm pretty sure that all the comments about how it was "rarely seen" are because people weren't paying attention to them before in the way they do now.

In any case, to dismiss something as AI slap based solely on this one thing is both lazy and rude, and should be treated as such.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#308

Post by balamatom » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 1:31 AM UTC

whynotminot wrote: post #245

balamatom wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is both annoying and self-defeating No brother. You are the one being annoyed by it, because you are the one doing nothing about it. >What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility? What I know I refused 'em out of principle, turns out I'm doing fine. I also know for certain that had I not refused them, I would not be doing fine. >to hang onto a good life as…

You still haven’t suggested anything practical to actually do. That’s a lot of words to say basically nothing.

Step 1: Risk something

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#309

Post by rafaelero » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 3:08 AM UTC

toprerules wrote: post #283

rafaelero wrote: post #181

It's honestly not that deep. If AI increases productivity, we should accept it. If it doesn't, then the hype will eventually fade out. In any case, having attachment to the craft is a bit cringe. Technological progress trumps any emotional attachment.

I sincerely wonder how some people go around having 0 emotional attachment to any of their hobbies or passions - or maybe you're just extremely unfortunate and live your life completely focused on producing output for someone else.

Contributing to human welfare through technological advances and productivity gains is a much better place to deposit my hopes and emotions, imo.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#310

Post by whynotminot » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 12:41 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #302

whynotminot wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it, but fundamentally this is a forum discussing technology, and AI is part of that. Especially as it relates to software engineering. I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it. The collective whinging in every AI topic is both annoying and self-defeating.

This is hacker news, supposedly. And vibe coding is pretty much diametrically opposite to the hacker ethos.

Many of you don't seem to grasp that AI isn't a binary "don't use at all" or "all-in on pure slop" proposition. AI assisted development is not automatically vibe-coding.

Believe it or not, you can actually use these tools to level up your skills and understanding faster and then ship better code! Like with any powerful tool, it requires some care to use it correctly.