[stack_framer]

> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise.

Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!

I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code.

I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

I want to write code.

[zparky]

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

[IanCal]

There are three takes that I think are not depressing:

* Being excited to be able to write the pieces of code they want, and not others. When you sit down to write code, you do not do everything from scratch, you lean on libraries, compilers, etc. Take the most annoying boilerplate bit of code you have to write now - would you be happy if a new language/framework popped up that eliminated it?

* Being excited to be able to solve more problems because the code is at times a means to an end. I don't find writing CSS particularly fun but I threw together a tool for making checklists for my kids in very little time using llms and it handled all of the css for printing vs on the screen. I'm interested in solving an optimisation issue with testing right now, but not that interested in writing code to analyse test case perf changes so the latter I got written for me in very little time and it's great. It wasn't really a choice of me or machine, I do not really have the time to focus on those tasks.

* Being excited that others can get the outcomes I've been able to get for at least some problems, without having to learn how to code.

As is tradition, to torture a car analogy, I could be excited for a car that autonomously drives me to the shops despite loving racing rally cars.

[wakawaka28]

Those are all good outcomes, up to a point. But if this stuff works TOO well, most or maybe all of us will have to start looking at other career options. Whatever autonomy you think you have in deciding what the AI does, that can ultimately be trained as well, and it will be the more people use it.

I personally don't like it when others who don't know how to code are able to get results using AI. I spent many years of my life and a small fortune learning scarce skills that everyone swore would be the last to ever be automated. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, those skills are being automated and there is seemingly no worthwhile job that can't be automated given enough investment. I am hopeful because the AI still has a long way to go, but even with the improvements it currently has, it might ultimately destroy the tech industry. I'm hoping that Say's Law proves true in this case, but even before the AI I was skeptical that we would find work for all the people trying to get into the software industry.

[JarieSuisen]

I get the feeling, but I can't help but also say it sounds like how I imagine professional portrait artists felt about the photograph. Or scribes about audio recordings. Or any other occupation that similarly got more or less replaced by a technological advance.

Those jobs still exist, but by large are either very niche or work using that tech in some way.

It is not wrong to feel down about the risk of so much time, training, etc rapidly losing value. But it also isn't wrong that change isn't bad, and sometimes that includes adjusting how we use our skills and/or developing new ones. Nobody gets to be elite forever, they will be replaced and become common or unneeded eventually. So it's probably more helpful for yourself and those that may want to rely on you to be forward-thinking rather than complaining. Doesn't mean you have to become pro-AI, but may be helpful to be pragmatic and work where it can't.

As to work supply... I figure that will always be a problem as long as money is the main point of work. If people could just work where they specialize without so much concern for issues like not starving, maybe it would be a different. I dunno.

[badsectoracula]

> I personally don't like it when others who don't know how to code are able to get results using AI.

Sounds like for many programmers AI is the new Visual Basic 6 :-P

[wakawaka28]

It's worse than that lol. At least with VB 6 and similar scripting languages, there is still code getting written. Now we have complete morons who think they're software developers because they got some AI to shit out an app for them. This is going to affect how people view the profession of software engineering all around.

[ares623]

Except in this case you won't be able to afford going to the shops anymore. Or even if the shops will still be around. What use is an autonomous car if you can't use it.

[zahlman]

I suspect, rather strongly, that what really specifically wears programmers down is boilerplate.

AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it.

I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.

[projektfu]

Or, for me, yak shaving. I start a project with enthusiasm and then 8 hours later I'm debugging an nginx config file or something rather than working on the core project. AI gets a lot of that out of the way if you let it, and you can at least let it grind on that stuff while you think about other things.

[zahlman]

For me, the yak shaving is the part where I get the next project idea...

[seanmcdirmid]

It is fun. It takes some skill to organize a pipeline to generate code that would be tedious to write and maintain otherwise. You are still writing stuff to instruct the computer, but now you have something taking natural language instructions and generating code and code test assets.

There might have been people who were happy to write assembly that got bummed about compilers. This AI stuff judt feels like a new way to write code.

[johnnyaardvark]

I've heard this take a few times, but I'm not convinced using general language is the new way to write code (beyond small projects).

Inevitably AI will writes things in ways you don't intend. So now you have to prompt it to change and hope it gets it right. Oh, it didn't. Prompt it again and maybe this time will work. Will it get it right this time? And so on.

It's so good at a lot of things, but writing out whole features or apps in my experience seems good at first, but then it turns out to be a time sync of praying it will figure it out on this next prompt.

Maybe it's a skill issue for me, but I've gotten the most efficiency out of having it review code, pair with it on ideas and problems, etc. rather than actually writing the majority of code.

[seanmcdirmid]

Until you've actually done it yourself, it will probably sound like vapor ware. The only question is how much energy are you willing to spend, in terms of actual energy (because you are making more calls to the AI) and yes, setting up your development pipeline with N LLM calls.

It is really like micro-managing a very junior very forgetful dev but they can read really fast (and they mostly remember what they read for a few minutes at least, they actually know more about something than you do if they have a manual about it on hand). Of course, if its just writing the code once, you don't bother with the junior dev and write the code yourself. But if you want long term efficiency, you put the time into your team (and team here is the AI).

[youoy]

I think that the main missunderstanding is that we used to think programming=coding, but this is not the case. LLMs allow people to use natural language as a programming language, but you still need to program. As with every programing language, it requires you to learn how to use it.

Not everyone needs to be excited about LLMs, in the same way that C++ developers dont need to be excited about python.

[solumunus]

Do you really think the creative or intellectual element of programming is the tapping of keys? I don't understand this at all. I enjoy solving problems and creating elegant solutions. I'm spending less time tapping keys and more time engineering solutions. If tapping keys is the most fun part for you, then that's fine! But let's not pretend THAT is the critical part of software engineering. Not to mention, it's not all or nothing. The options aren't writing code or not writing code. You can selectively not write any boring code and write 100% of the bits you find interesting or care about. If an LLM is failing to deliver what is in my minds eye then I simply step in and make sure the code is quality... I'm doing more and better software engineering, that's why I'm happy, that's the bit that scratches my itch.

[xyzwave]

I hate writing code, but love debugging. LLMs have been a godsend for banging out boilerplate and getting things 95% of the way there. Now I spend most of my time on the hard stuff (debugging, refactoring), while building things that would have taken weeks in days. It’s honestly made the act of building software more enjoyable and rewarding.

[xnx]

Some carpenters like to make cabinets. Some just like to hammer nails.

[DevDesmond]

Perhaps consider that I still think coding by prompting is just another layer of abstraction on top of coding.

I'm my mind, writing the prompt that generates the code is somewhat analogous to writing the code that generates the assembly. (Albeit, more stochastically, the way psychology research might be analogous to biochemistry research).

Different experts are still required at different layers of abstraction, though. I don't find it depressing when people show preference for working at different levels of complexity / tooling, nor excitement about the emergence of new tools that can enable your creativity to build, automate, and research. I think scorn in any direction is vapid.

[layer8]

One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.

[youoy]

It completely depends on the way you prompt the model. Nothing prevents you from telling it exactly what you want, to the level of specifying the files and lines to focus on. In my experience anything other than that is a recepy for failure in sufficiently complex projects.

[layer8]

Several comments can be made here: (1) You only control what the LMM generates to the extent that you specify precisely what it should generate. You cannot reasons about what it will generate for what you don't specify. (2) Even for what you specify precisely, you don't actually have full control, because the LLM is not reliable in a way you can reason about. (3) The more you (have to) specify precisely what it should generate, the less benefit using the LLM has. After all, regular coding is just specifying everything precisely.

The upshot is, you have to review everything the LLM generates, because you can't predict the qualities or failures of its output. (You cannot reason in advance about what qualities and failures it definitely will or will not exhibit.) This is different from, say, using a compiler, whose output you generally don't have to review, and whose input-to-output relation you can reason about with precision.

Note: I'm not saying that using an LLM for coding is not workable. I'm saying that it lacks what people generally like about regular coding, namely the ability to reason with absolute precision about the relation between the input and the behavior of the output.

[yunwal]

You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!

[palmotea]

>> One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.

> You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!

You missed the key point. You can't predict and LLM's "outcome with high precision."

Looking at the output and evaluating it after the fact (like you describe) is an entirely different thing.

[yunwal]

For many things you can though. If I ask an LLM to create an alert in terraform that triggers when 10% of requests fail over a 5 minute period and sends an email to some address, with the html on the email looking a certain way, it will do exactly the same as if I looked at the documentation, and figured out all of the fields 1 by 1. It’s just how it works when there’s one obvious way to do things. I know software devs love to romanticize about our jobs but I don’t know a single dev who writes 90% meaningful code. There’s always boilerplate. There’s always fussing with syntax you’re not quite familiar with. And I’m happy to have an AI do it

[rester324]

I love to write code too. But what usually happens is that I go through running the gauntlet of proving how brilliant code I can write in a job interview, and then later conversely being paid for listening to really dumb conversations of our stakeholders and sitting in project planning, etc meetings just so that finally everybody can harass me to implement something that a million programmer implemented before me a million times, at which point the only metric that matters to either my fellow developers or my managers or the stakeholders is the speed of churning the code out, quality or design be damned. So for this reason in most cases in my work I use LLMs.

How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.

[agumonkey]

I got mentally hit hard by the 2nd push of vibe coding (gemini-cli and similar) for reasons you mention. I'd add a that:

- inverse career growth structure and black hole effect

usually, an industry has a number of skills to hone, you start with simple ones, and as you go you may learn more to do harder, and earn more. the more you love, the more you learn, the better for you. this is evaporating.. and worse, the people who don't love it, get to run you over. you're now competing in the 'llm orchestration game' where the most mentally intense task is to chat with the cli and check its output.

llms may also be all encompassing, even if I adapt and accept that well software engineering is done for, i don't even foresee what i should learn now.. my brain thinking power is not that great, and the places where llms can't beat human are probably post-graduate intelligence and i can't compete much here either.

how i see it it's a middle layer collapse

[doug_durham]

Writing code is my passion, and like you I'm amazed I get paid to do it. That said in any new project there is a large swath of code that needs to be written that I've written many times before. I'm happy to let the LLM write the low value code so I can work on the interesting parts. Examples of this type of code are argument parsers and interfacing with REST interfaces. I add no value there.

[citrin_ru]

> I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

Some people don't enjoy writing code and went into software development only because it's a well paid and a stable job. Now this trade is under the thread and they are happy to switch to prompting LLMs. I do like to code so use LLMs less then many my colleagues.

Though I don't expect to see many from this crowd in HM, instead I expect here to see entrepreneurs who need a product to sell and don't care if it is written by humans or by LLMs.

[averageRoyalty]

So write code.

Maybe post renaissance many artists no longer had patrons, but nothing was stopping them from painting.

If your industry truely is going in the direction where there's no paid work for you to code (which is unlikely in my opinion), nobody is stopping you. It's easier than ever, you have decades of personal computing at your fingertips.

Most people with a thing they love do it as a hobby, not a job. Maybe you've had it good for a long time?

[tjr]

From the GNU Manifesto:

I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html

[harimau777]

That's tough to do without time and money. Which is something we certainly won't have if the decent jobs get automated out of existence.

[marcosdumay]

I'm quite ok with only writing code in my personal time. In fact, if I could solve the problems there faster, I'd be delighted.

Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational value.

[georgeecollins]

I also love to code, though it's not what people pay to do anymore.

You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is, does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto: don't predict, prepare.

[djeastm]

>You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does.

Lots of wiggle room between "never" or "usually". We're not all riding Segways or wearing VR goggles. Seems wiser to work on case-by-case basis here.

[gspr]

> You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does.

Really? Are you sure there isn't a lot of confirmation bias in this? Do you really have a good handle on 100-year-old tech hypes that didn't deliver? All I can think of is "flying everything".

[torben-friis]

>I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

Regardless of AI this has been years in the making. “Learn to code” has been the standard grinder cryptobro advice for “follow the money” for a while, there’s a whole generation of people getting into the industry for financial reasons (which is not wrong, just a big cultural shift).

[thendrill]

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares

Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.

Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.

So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.

I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.