[greymalik]

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.

To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments

That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

[codyb]

Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.

Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?

The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.

[mupuff1234]

Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the users?

[rpcope1]

How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.

[CuriouslyC]

Git doesn't just have warts, its DX is actively bad. If it was good you wouldn't have so many tools designed to make it not suck to work with 20 years after release. The graph first and diff first design decisions are both bad choices that are probably burning millions of man hours per year fixing things that should just work (to be fair, they were the right decisions at the time, times have changed).

[mupuff1234]

But it's not that people don't grasp the concept of merge conflicts, it's just that the UX of git is bad.

[codyb]

It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.

Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.

[dgunay]

What about any tool, language, library, or codebase that is unnecessarily complex? Should we never bother to put in the effort to learn to use them? It doesn't mean they are without value to us as programmers. For better or worse, the hallmark of many good programmers I've met is a much higher than average tolerance for sitting down and just figuring out how something computer-related works instead of giving up and routing around it.

[array_key_first]

The issue is with the problem space - version control and reconciliation is hard. The fact we even have software to automate 99% of it is amazing.

Lawyers spend literally hundreds of hours doing just that. Well, their paralegals do.

Git is a legitimately amazing tool, but it can't magically make version control free. You still have to think because ultimately software can't decide which stuff is right and which is wrong.

[1718627440]

Nah.

Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem in any professional environment.

[ares623]

Careful with the “doesn’t add value” talk. If you follow it far enough to its logical end, you get to “Existence doesn’t add value”

[jckahn]

This is one of those random internet comments that I'll be thinking about for decades. Thank you for sharing it!

[cool_man_bob]

That’s the point lol.

[bcrosby95]

The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?

[whynotminot]

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm

You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.

I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.

[OkayPhysicist]

It's because there are a significant number of us for who tinkering with and building shit is basically a compulsion. And software development is vastly more available, and quicker to iterate and thus more satisfying, than any other tinkering discipline. It's probably related to whatever drives some people to make art, the only difference being that the market has decided that the tinkers are worth a hell of a lot more.

For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.

I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you implement tasks fast with shitty code instead of considering the fact that tasks are easy to implement and the code is really fast as a strong evidence that the abstractions were well-chosen.

Thus, I believe that people who just do it for the money have it easier in the "programming industry" than programmers who really love programming, and are thus a big annoyance to managers.

I thus really wonder myself why companies tell all the time about "love for programming" instead of "love for paying the bills" and "love for implementing tasks fast with shitty code", which would give them people who are a much better culture fit for their real organizational processes.

[carlosjobim]

Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees programming as a means to an end and nothing else.

If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this.

That's also how people like me see programming. If the code delivers what we need, then great. Leave it be like that. There are more interesting problems to solve, no need to mess with a solution which is working well.

[int_19h]

The problem is that "code delivers what we need" usually translates to "shovel crap as fast as it sells". Combined with heavy monopolization of the software market, where users have very little recourse to being force-fed crap - what are you going to do, go to one other competitor who does the same exact thing? - this means that average software quality in the industry has declined to the point where I would consider shipping it in that state to be actively harmful to the users and to the ecosystem at large (since others then build upon that pile of crap, which of course is a GIGO problem).

Now, you might argue that it doesn't matter because it's not the users who pay you, it's the company. But, well - some people have professional standards. It's rather unfortunate that this is apparently not compatible with "doing business" in this day and age, at least outside of very narrow niches.

[skydhash]

The things is most times, you are indeed buying the car that is going to make the delivery. And it's going to live in your garage. And if you're not careful, one day it will drive itself off a cliff, stall in the middle of a 10 hour drive, or you'll get robbed by individuals hiding in the trunk.

People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that crash does happen and they don't know how to recover, so queue up the war room, etc...

Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.

[carlosjobim]

> Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.

How do you mean? If the software works, then it's done. There is no maintenance and it will continue working like that for decades. It doesn't have corrosion and moving parts like a car. Businesses make sure not to touch it or the systems it is depending on.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "...without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills..."

Oh, I wouldn't say that. The hacker culture of the 1970s from which the word hacker originated often poked fun at incurious corporate programmers and IIRC even Edsger Dijkstra wrote a fair bit of acerbic comments about them and their disinterest in the craft and science of computing.

[whynotminot]

Well, most of them (the hackers from the 70s) probably did do it solely for the love of the game.

We’re 50 years past that now. We’re in the era of boot camps. I feel semi confident saying “most of us” meaning the current developer work force are here for well paying jobs.

Don’t get me wrong I like software development! I enjoy my work. And I think I’d probably like it better than most things I’d otherwise be doing.

But what I’ve been getting at is that I enjoy it for the solving problems part. The actual writing of code itself for me just happens to be the best way to enjoy problem solving while making good money that enables a comfortable life.

To be put it another way, if being a SWE paid a poverty wage, I would not be living in a trailer doing this for my love of coding. I would go be a different kind of engineer.

[Izkata]

> We’re in the era of boot camps.

I think bootcamp era was a decade ago and we're past it now. Not long ago I saw something on here about how a lot of them are closing down and attendance is dropping for the ones still open - likely because of LLMs.

[inglor_cz]

At 47, I am an older guy already. But in my generation, people who went on to be programmers usually started tinkering with code at ~ 11 y.o. (back then on ZX Spectrum and similar cheap beasts available in freshly post-Communist Europe) out of interest and passion, not because of "I want to build a lucrative career".

(Given how massively widespread piracy was back then, programming looked rather like a good way to do hard work for free.)

Money matters, but coders who were drawn into the field purely by money and are personally detached from the substance of the job is an unknown species for me.

"You can also solve problems as a local handyman"

That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.

[pjmlp]

At the edge of 50, similar experience.

Additionally in many countries, being a developer is an office worker like everyone else, there isn't SV lottery level salaries.

In fact, those of us that rather stay programmers beyond 30 years old are usually seen as failure, from society point of view, where is our hunger for career and climbing up the ladder?

Now the whole set of SaaS products, with low code integrations, that were already a bit depressing from programmer point of view, are getting AI agents as well.

It feels like coding as in the old days is increasingly being left for hobby coding, or a few selected ones working on industry infrastructure products/frameworks.

[bdangubic]

Hard agree, I am 51 and all of this resonates true with me except…

> That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.

if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast :)

[inglor_cz]

> if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast

I don't believe that. When it comes to motoric skills, including dancing etc., I am probably in the lowest quintile of the population.

Of course, I could become somewhat better by spending crazy amounts of time on training, but I would still be non-competitive even in comparison with an average person.

OTOH I am pretty good at writing prose/commentary, even though it is not a particulary lucrative activity, to the degree of being a fairly known author in Czechia. My tenth book is just out.

Talents are weird and seem to have mind of their own. I never planned to become an author, but something inside just wanted out. My first book was published just a few days shy of my 40th birthday, so not a "youthful experiment" by any means.

[whynotminot]

Just chiming in to say that in this — my era of AI Anxiety — it’s pretty cool you found something new and interesting to apply your talents to at 40.

It feels like we’re all going to have to have a reinvention or two ahead of us.

[jmkni]

Handyman work can pay very very well for those who are good at it

[jimbokun]

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?

[bdangubic]

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 position yourself as one that knows how to set shit up for the “great replacement”

[jimbokun]

Yes we are rapidly moving towards a time where bullshitting will be more valued than deep understanding and problem solving. Both LLMs and the broader culture are pushing in that direction.

[int_19h]

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.

[whynotminot]

We all owe every part of everything to those who’ve come before us. That goes without saying, really.

> 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.

Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod.

I also understand the possibility of all of this potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking my job.

What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?

Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this. The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of petulance + burying head in the sand.

[jimbokun]

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 other people.

It was wonderful.

I know you don’t care. So just go to some other forum where you don’t have to endure the whining of us who have lost something that was important to us.

[whynotminot]

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.

[NeutralCrane]

It’s not about not caring. It’s about accepting reality.

[veegee]

Sounds like a mediocre developer. No respect for people like you.

[whynotminot]

It’s a good thing I haven’t needed your respect so far to have a pretty successful career as a software engineer.

[0x457]

A bit harsh off a single post. I like solving problems, not just software engineering problems and I like writing code as a hobby, but I went to this job field only due to high salary and benefits.

In fact, I usually hate writing code at day job because it is boring things 20 out of 26 sprints.

[Barrin92]

>A bit harsh off a single post.

I don't think it is. Labeling passion and love for your work "tech fetishism", is spiritually bankrupt. Mind you we're in general here not talking about people working in a mine to survive, which is a different story.

But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account? That is the fetish, that is someone who has himself become an automaton. It's no surprise they seem to take no issues with LLMs because they're already living like one. Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?

[NeutralCrane]

It definitely is. You are taking it way too far with your criticisms.

[0x457]

> Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?

Do you understand work-life balance? I get paid to do the job, I satisfy my curiosities in my free-time.

> But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account?

Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love is something that is achievable in our society, at least not for most people.

IMO, the real fetishization here is "work is something more than a way to get paid" that's a corporate propaganda I'm not falling for.

[aleph_minus_one]

> The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?

Because in a lot of jobs where you (have to) solve problems, the actual problems to solve are rather "political". So, if you are not good at office politics or you are not a good diplomat, software is often a much better choice.

[MountDoom]

The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.

It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.

[OkayPhysicist]

I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people here who fell into software development because it's one of the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into this profession due to getting into programming because it fed an innate need to tinker, and then after they spent a ton of time on it discovered that it was the best way to pay the bills available to them.

[wing-_-nuts]

I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.

[jimbokun]

Yep, and the younger people like us growing up now are just fucked.

[cool_man_bob]

Don’t worry, once you’re no longer needed you’ll get to experience that life of poverty you missed out.

[wing-_-nuts]

Nah, I've reached the point where I'll be just fine. Don't worry about me.

[toprerules]

> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.

It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".

I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.

[wolvesechoes]

> but it doesn’t add value

Sad to see people reduce themselves willingly to cogs inside business machine.

[keeda]

You can spend as much time as you want on "configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments" and otherwise honing your craft, the business machine will still look at you as cogs.

May seem depressing, but the bright side is that you as an individual are then free to find joy in your work wherever you can find it... whether its in delivering high-quality code, or just collecting a paycheck.

[wolvesechoes]

> the business machine will still look at you as cogs

Of course, but I said that people see themselves this way.

To be clear, personally I do not find fiddling with configs particularly exciting, but some people do.

[gr4vityWall]

> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value

I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but those statements are subjective, not an objective truth. Lots of people fundamentally enjoy the process of coding, and would keep doing it even in a hypothetical world with no problems left to solve, or if they had UBI.

[GaryBluto]

These are my thoughts exactly. Whenever I use agents to assist me in creating a simple program for myself, I carefully guide it through everything I want created, with me usually writing pages and pages of detailed plaintext instructions and specifications when it comes to the backends of things, I then modify it and design a user interface.

I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy designing (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.

[CuriouslyC]

> To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

100% this. I think a lot of the people who are angry at AI coding for them are "code calligraphers" who care more about the form of the thing they're making than the problem that it solves. I can't see how someone's who's primarily solution focused would shed a tear at AI coding for them.

[kiitos]

> To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

solving problems is an outcome of programming, not the purpose of programming

[davidw]

I think the author makes a decent point with regards to 'problem solving' and better tools and how LLM's somehow feel different. Fortran is a better tool, but you can still reproducibly trace things back to assembly code through the compiler.

LLM's feel like a non-deterministic compiler that transforms English into code of some sort.

[dingnuts]

A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't add value

A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end

This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.

[senordevnyc]

Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?

[jimbokun]

Ok then throw a frozen meal from the supermarket into the microwave and be done with it.

Outcome is really the same, right? Why waste all that effort on a deep understanding of how to prepare food?

[codyb]

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.

[senordevnyc]

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 in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.

[codyb]

Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have been able to happen without the decade of experience it took you to get to the Staff level engineering position at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the skills required to review the AI code you're producing properly.

[senordevnyc]

Totally true. But that's also a different point than "But I love using my knives!"

[int_19h]

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).

[jay_kyburz]

A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?

[senordevnyc]

Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!

I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?

But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?

[ThrowawayR2]

There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.

The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...

[senordevnyc]

Absolutely true. In my case, I'm trying to run a restaurant, so this is all excellent news for me.

[jay_kyburz]

You'll be doing fine too, just doing other work.

And you can see it coming so there is plenty of time to prepare.

[trashchomper]

I genuinely don't think it's hard to compete. I use AI sometimes, I don't use it more than I use it. I find myself at least just-as-productive as people who primarily use AI.

I personally tire of people acting like it's some saving grace that doubles/triples/100x your productivity and not a tool that may give you 10-20% uplift just like any other tool

[NewsaHackO]

>The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives

They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately

[pmg101]

But what if the New Way to prepare food was to put a box into a microwave , wait 60 seconds, then hand it to the customer?

Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?

[senordevnyc]

If that's your analogy, then shouldn't you be able to dominate the market by not using AI?

[pmg101]

Cheap, fast, mechanised food provision does dominate the market. For price reasons

Nevertheless there's still a luxury market for hand prepared food.

Perhaps software will evolve the same way

[NewsaHackO]

This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster was going on about knives, forgetting that the final product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food is inferior, then the food is inferior.

[blashyrk]

> coding is the means to an end

...

> doesn't add value

What about intrinsic value? So many programmers on HN seem to just want to be MBAs in their heart of hearts

[NeutralCrane]

Some of you have never been laid off and it shows.

Intrinsic value is great, where achievable. Companies do not care at all about intrinsic value. I take pride in my work and my craft to the extent I am allowed to, but the reality is that those of us who can’t adapt to the businesses desires will be made obsolete and cut loose, regardless of whatever values we hold.

[whynotminot]

I got a few paragraphs into this piece before rolling my eyes and putting it down.

I consider myself an engineer — a problem solver. Like you said, code is just the means to solve the problems put before me.

I’m just as content if solving the problem turns out to be a process change or user education instead of a code commit.

I have no fetish for my terminal window or IDE.

[NewsaHackO]

The issue is that a lot of “programmers” think bike-shedding is the essence of programming. Fifty years ago, they would have been the ones saying that not using punch cards takes away from the art of programming, and then proudly showing off multiple intricate hole punchers they designed for different scenarios.

Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological environment will never devalue their skills. It’s only those who rest on their laurels who have this issue.