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It used to be hard

praf.me

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Re: It used to be hard

#91

Post by RetroTechie »

randysalami wrote: post #36
simonw wrote: post #21

If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software . I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that. Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.

Yes! And more projects. And you have the freedom to try and fail. Was thinking of a comparison, cars are faster than walking. Imagine saying, no I prefer only walking. It is healthier than sitting in a car and your legs will atrophy. That is very much true (and we can see the consequences in car dominated societies). Nevertheless, for many industries cars are very important. You don’t say, I would rather carry all th…

You see more detail when you move slower.

Re: It used to be hard

#92

Post by jstummbillig »

hugeBirb wrote: post #33

What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with…

Why would it? You still need to be able to understand and describe a problem (if the space is complex, that usually means: many connected problems) and that requires good thinking.

Re: It used to be hard

#94

Post by simonw »

davidw wrote: post #87
simonw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or download for free from half a dozen Chinese AI labs (at least for the moment.) ... or Google Gemma or Mistral.

Aren't those widely regarded as 'not as good', because right now LLM's are a game of "who has the most resources wins"? And even those require very high end personal computers. The freedom pendulum looks like it swung away from individuals. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100

They're not Opus 4.5 level yet, though the really big Kimi and DeepSeek v4 models (which need like 600+ GB of GPU-available RAM) aren't too far off.

Re: It used to be hard

#95

Post by fusslo »

simonw wrote: post #72
fusslo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 0x engineer became a 10x vibe-coder responsible for our CICD and vibe-coded testing that was previously manual He's introduced several 100,000s LoC changes and additions in 10-15 codebases. There are some repos that only he works in ( so no PRs, just merge to master and be done ). He also has self-approved and merged changes without review (he's an admin) Anyway, now he put in his notice and no one on his team kn…

Hah, ultimate vibe coder nightmare scenario. I wonder if, in six months time, there will be enough stories like this for sanity to prevail a little more.

I REALLY hope management takes notice

it's going to be so expensive. I learned the vibe coder's contract rate is going to be 2-3x his current salary

Re: It used to be hard

#96

Post by kolinko »

direwolf20 wrote: post #47
kolinko wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built an orchestrator connected to email, browser and payments, and it handles a ton of boring stuff like “pay electricity”, or “apt renters want something, deal with that”, or scheduling appointments, dealing with infoline chatbots and everything around that. Plus navigating personal communication (what’s the address of friend X, who did I promise to go to a dance workshop with) and so on… In essense, anything Sir…

Hi landlord, I lost my wallet and need a refund of last month's rent. You're absolutely right!

Not like that. When they have an issue that can be solved by my orchestrator I fwd it.

Re: It used to be hard

#97

Post by Izkata »

blanched wrote: post #41
skydhash wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think writing code was ever hard. It’s basically the same level of difficulty as learning to write sheet music, a foreign language, or mathematical formula. Same with basic computer concepts. The hardest part is the formal logic, recursive reasoning, and how to abstract. It’s a thinking mode that some find difficult to adopt. As for domain knowledge, I don’t think that has ever been difficult to obtain. Just…

Interesting - I’ve been thinking that when people say “writing code” they mean figuring out abstractions, logic, reasoning. Without that, what’s left? The syntax? Realizing we might not all have the same thing in mind when someone says “writing code was never hard/easy” is making a lot of other comments I’ve read here make more sense!

> Without that, what’s left? The syntax?

I ran a small experiment on co-workers around a decade ago and learned that often enough they don't read code, more like they decipher it. Which all of a sudden the obsession with code linters and formatters suddenly made sense (though I still don't like them). And being unable to read code, I have to guess writing it was difficult too.

Afterwards one of them said it never even crossed his mind it was possible to read code like that.

Re: It used to be hard

#98

Post by _praf »

thimabi wrote: post #53
Taikonerd wrote: post #37

> Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop? It used to be hard Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.

Very convincing indeed! I really want to know what AI made that, as I’m looking forward to creating personal/customized music in a similar way.

Author here: I used Suno. I've played around with music production using things like Ableton and Logic Pro and I was completely blown away by Suno. It's really so much fun.

Re: It used to be hard

#99

Post by _praf »

simonw wrote: post #21

If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software . I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that. Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.

I think my point in the post is: even though I may have graduated to writing more ambitious software (see: "managing a fleet of agentic coding agents"), and still find challenge in my work, it may be unreasonable to expect everyone to do that. This applies more to your typical salaried employee than solopreneur builder.

(huge fan of your blog/pelicans btw)

Re: It used to be hard

#100

Post by simonw »

_praf wrote: post #99
simonw wrote: post #21

If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software . I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that. Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.

I think my point in the post is: even though I may have graduated to writing more ambitious software (see: "managing a fleet of agentic coding agents"), and still find challenge in my work, it may be unreasonable to expect everyone to do that. This applies more to your typical salaried employee than solopreneur builder. (huge fan of your blog/pelicans btw)

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

If you're a developer who's always been happy to build the next CRUD API endpoint and never felt frustrated at having to solve variants of the same problem over and over again, this new era is a pretty nasty shock.

I'm never sure how common that archetype is though.

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