461–470 of 697 posts
I gave up after the third “It’s not X, it’s Y” in like two paragraphs. Is nobody else allergic to that AI voice? Isn’t the author? So depressing this is the current state of blogging. Can’t wait for this phase to be over.
I didn't really notice it at first but on a second read it's full of this crap?
> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that. Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing. Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow…
> There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.
In many ways, things like RPi and Arduino have actually massively expanded the realm of totally hackable computing beyond what was even possible for early personal computer users.
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That's because it's like summiting a mountain by taking a skilift to the top. You don't really need to put in the work and anyone can do it.
Sure, and if the reason you're going to the top of the mountain is to deliver supplies to people who need them, you should absolutely take the lift.
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Disagree entirely. If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point. In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it. The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it…
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Reaganomics has never worked
> Reaganomics has never worked Depends how you look at it. Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.
I'm significantly younger than OP, but this was it for me too. I'm autistic and found the world around me confusing growing up. Computers were wonderful because they were the only thing that really made sense to me.
I was obsessed with computers since I was 5. I started programming probably around age 10. Then in my early teens I started creating Flash applications, writing PHP, Java, etc...
When I look back on my early career now it was almost magical. This in the mid to late 00s (late to some I know), but this was before the era of package managers, before resources like Stackoverflow, before modern IDEs. You had some fairly basic frameworks to work with, but that was really about it. Everything else had to be done fully by hand.
This was also before agile was really a thing too. The places I worked at the time didn't have stand-ups or retrospectives. There were no product managers.
It was also before the iPhone and the mass adoption of the internet.
Back then no one went into software engineering as a profession. It was just some thing weird computer kids did, and sometimes businesses would pay us to build them things. Everyone who coded back then I got along with great, now everyone is so normal it's hard for me to relate with me. The industry today is also so money focused.
The thing and bothers me the most though is that computers increasingly act like humans that I need to talk to to get things done, and if that wasn't bad enough I also have to talk with people constantly.
Even the stuff I build sucks. All the useful stuff has been build so in the last decade or so stuff I've built feels increasingly detached from reality. When I started I felt like I was solving real practical problems for companies, now I'm building chatbots and internal dashboards. It's all bollocks.
There was a post recently about builders vs coders (I can't remember exactly). But I'm definitely a coder. I miss coding. There was something rewarding about pouring hours into a HTML design, getting things pixel perfect. Sometimes it felt laborious, but that was part of the craft. Claude Code does a great job and it does it 50x faster than I could, but it doesn't give me the same satisfaction.
I do hope this is my last job in tech. Unfortunately I'm not old enough to retire, but I think I need to find something better suited to my programatic way of thinking. I quite like the idea of doing construction or some other manual labour job. Seems like they're still building things by hand and don't have so many stupid meetings all the time.
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but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it? If so, other sites beckon.
No, anyone can do it.
So many people on "Hacker" News could benefit from reading the canonical text on the subject by Steven Levy. A true hacker wants to bring the fire down the mountain. People around here just want to piss on it.
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I resonate with that. I also find writing code super pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with a giddy high. What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still…
I'm in the enjoy writing code camp and do see merits of the hybrid approach, but I also worry about the (mental) costs. I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration. In isolation,…
Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace.
LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes.
Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
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> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. It's very sad, for me. Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games. I'm looking at all these people proudly showin…
I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't really have much ground to complain
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What else do you do to make rent ? I feel the same way as you and I have no idea what else pays well for quality craftsmanship. I am staring at the abyss of hyper intelligent people with posh resumes and now wondering what to do.
According to his profile, he teaches CS and Math.