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

I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 387 posts

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#71

Post by 8note »

rafaelmn wrote: post #23
sho_hn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.

im not convinced that it will.

you dont notice it when you are only looking at your own harness results, but the llm bakes so very much of your own skills and opinions into what it does.

LLMs still regurgitate a ton.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#72

Post by mattdecker100 »

moomin wrote: post #47

Not the point of the article but > 15 years of Clojure experience My God I’m old.

Old? OP showed a pic of an Apple IIe. I bought one for a few thousand bucks (I forget exactly how much). I've been an SE for 44 years. We just added the final abstraction layer.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#73

Post by usernametaken29 »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

I’ve worked in financial modelling before where you need to make sure results are correct, not approximate. One time there was a nasty bug in pandas multiindexes (admittedly we banned pandas for all new code because it just can’t do semver). Spent 9 days to debug three lines of code. Endurance and patience are learned skills and sometimes they’re the only way you can get a correct verifiable solution.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#74

Post by SrslyJosh »

dang wrote: post #118

[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)

> "coding the old way"

You mean the way that the majority of code is still written by professionals?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#75

Post by daneel_w »

Depressing. It's like reading has-been actors' stories about how they went to wellness retreats to "reconnect with themselves" to try get back on the job. I can't wait for the day when the same type of people as the author - or indeed, the author himself - start labeling plain regular programming as "artisanal" and "craft".

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#77

Post by mapontosevenths »

jjice wrote: post #65
Trasmatta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.

But oh my god, do you remember how good it felt to finally fix it? The euphoria I felt after fixing bugs that I stayed up late working on is like nothing else.

Debugging code is fun for the same reason hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is: It feels really good when you stop.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#78

Post by bitwize »

The fact that with AI development, your brain is no longer in a tight feedback loop with the codebase, leading to a significant drift between your model and reality, is still a sticking point with me and agentic development. It feels like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. I lose all precision and dexterity.

I still keep hoping there'll be a glut of demand for traditional software engineers once the bibbi in the babka goes boom in production systems in a big way:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W1CHhxDSk

But agentic workflows are so good now—and bound to get better with things like Claude Mythos—that programming without LLMs looks more and more cooked as a professional technique (rather than a curiosity or exercise) with each passing day. Human software engineers may well end up out of the loop completely except for the endpoints in a few years.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#79

Post by z500 »

badc0ffee wrote: post #70
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something. But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing…

There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug. I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading…

Thank you for injecting some perspective into the thread of AI hysteria. I feel like everyone is imagining a bug in a CRUD app.
Post reply on HN