[Thanemate]

To those of you reading the comment section thinking something like the following:

>"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become better and better the more developers are using it, to the point where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this:

You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community ("upvote if you agree" -> self-calibration of the popular opinion), and there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this. I'm 45, and while I programmed as a hobby since I was 16 I turned it into a career during COVID, and all the pressure cooking LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression that I seriously can't even get myself writing anything "over the weekend".

I hope to God the next generation of wonder kids that is the equivalent of the 12 year old discovering how to bent the computer to do what they want it to do enjoy arguing with multiple agents concurrently back and forth.

[pmarreck]

> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression

this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing

but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivot in the short term

[matsemann]

Your analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country skiing. The connection with nature, the silence.

Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a smell of gasoline.

[cortesoft]

The analogy makes sense. Some people love riding snowmobiles, some people love cross country skiing, and some people love both. It makes sense that some of the people who love snowmobiling think cross country skiing is boring and tedious, and some people who love cross country skiing think snow mobiles are loud and obnoxious.

I don't think people are confused why there are the different types of people who like different winter sports, but people seem shocked that opinions differ on the enjoyment of using an LLM

[qnleigh]

I think the analogy hits home on both sides. You go faster, but you miss the meditative experience of going slow.

[heddycrow]

My knee jerk is that there are quite a few people who can't or won't snowmobile when needed and ski when needed.

That's where the analogy starts to break a bit. You can't mode switch between skis and snowmobile, but you sure can ai assist/not pretty quickly.

One more quick one - imagine skiers showing up to the snowmobile club hating on snowmobiles and vice versa.

I, for one, have still not properly got a grip on how tech enables this sort of a analogy-breaking reality.

Effing go ski then; there's even a club for that! (rhetorical, not directed at anyone in particular) And shame on me cause I show up to the ski club on a snowmobile with skis on my back.

[qnleigh]

Actually I think it still kinda works: - You could ski easy routes but snowmobile harder ones (not that anyone actually does this).

- Snowmobiles are loud and chew up the snow, analogous to AI flooding a repo with low-effort PRs?

[heddycrow]

I can guess that you like this exercise and you seem to be adept at it. I can't help but think you are my kind of people in that regard. Kudos!

[pmarreck]

I think this era has divided developers into 2 types:

1) Those who are interested in the journey

2) Those who are interested in getting to the new destination

[amelius]

Coding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it.

That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.

[microtonal]

I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it.

I either switch between two projects, or I keep an eye on what Claude is doing, because it often gets off the rails or in a direction I don't like and then it's easier to just stop it there and tell it what to do instead.

That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.

I might have felt like that when I was younger (almost 44 now, programming since 10), but over time I realized that the thing I enjoy is not really writing code itself, but coming up with ideas, solving puzzles, etc. LLMs are like insanely fast junior programmers, so they do the more mundane part of the task, but they need me to come up with good ideas, good taste, and solve design challenges. Otherwise it ends up as a pile of unmaintainable junior programmer code.

It is possible that LLMs might replace the other parts of being a good programmer as well, but for the time being it makes my work more pleasant, because I can work on interesting problems.

[zozbot234]

> I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code.

The AI should be spending most of its time helping you spec out new revisions to the codebase, the code-writing time is just the last step and if you've planned the work in depth, you'll understand what the AI is trying to do (and be able to stop and revise if anything is going off the rails). This is a healthier approach than "just spec out something else in the meantime" IMHO, but of course that happens too.

[ineedasername]

"just spec out something else in the meantime"

Yeah, I've learned that if I do too much of that I'll spend more time catching up in terms of consolidating gains through review of code and functionality. That's just me, people are clearly developing a few different and not "wrong" ways of going about things.

[tarr11]

52 here, been a full time people manager for about a decade now. Coding manually makes me tired just thinking about it. When I think about embark on a new project my mind goes back to all the times I worked 12 hour days trying to get some basic system to function. I’m too old for that now, my back hurts if I sit too long and occasionally get migraines if I look at a screen too much.

Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on the porch.

Sometimes i realize that my design was flawed and I just delete it all and start again, with no loss aversion.

[sidrag22]

> Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on the porch.

this resonates with me strongly, while i like coding, and understanding it, I understand my human limitations. I couldn't possibly write by hand the stuff I've been making, in the time I am making it, without a team these past few months. I would be coding literally all day, which while I sometimes enjoy the zoning out process of wiring stuff up, what i really enjoy is exactly what you described.

I enjoy being outside and walking my dog, taking a long shower, and cooking. All of these things are simple tasks with a good bit of repetition, and unlike wiring up some code or whatever, they allow my thoughts to flow, and I can think about where my projects are likely heading and what needs to be done next.

Those moments, even before heavy AI assisted coding, have always been the moments i cherish about software development.

[gdilla]

For me, coding since the 80s (but i knew then it didn't spark joy or anything - debugging was so annoying, learning new language syntax even more so...) I love AI. I am a product manager, i just see freedom to make things that are real and learn faster - does this solve a problem? Is it better than what we have now? and move on, disposing of things as i go because it's cheap. To fill the minutes, i might work on 3-4 or even 5 separate projects and even multiple worktrees within those. I feel busier than ever. I think the best part is it's not lazy and I am. There's so many things I don't have time or energy to go deep on that I can delegate. I'm jealous of real sw engineers because it's probably a huge force multiplier, while I can't call BS on it as much, but getting better.

[igravious]

two AIs -- I use Claude Code and Kimi CLI -- I got them to build an agent relay so they can communicate with each other (one plans, the other reviews the plan; one builds, the other reviews the build) -- while one is working on one thing, I'll be chatting and exploring with the other one … they can build anything in any language so if you are a skilled and experienced code you should be able to guide a pair of coding agents no problem.

Otoh -- if there is this bifurcation among coders (one group super-excited, one group depressed and angst-ridden) then maybe we should be trying to figure out why people are reacting the way they are. Can you explain more about your situation? What do you code? Do you have hobby projects? Do you have free time? Etc.

[ineedasername]

"how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code"

I usually review the code that's been written. Sometimes directly, sometimes by telling claude to bring things up piece by piece to explain choices as I review. Or I kick off one of the various maintenance tasks, validate my assumptions and expectations on how things should function, note the things that don't to be addressed. I'm going to have to do this stuff anyway, I might as well do it then.

Or I read something, or do something to clear my head. Sometimes because I need a mental break, because I find that the speed these tools having me working at can be taxing in different ways.

I think expectations of the "10x" variety whether you put that at 10 or 3x will have to be adjusted. Coding as fast as 5 developers is far far different than "A singly developer can produce as much as 5 others"

[heddycrow]

+1 review the code

Screw {some number}x. Such BS. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write and spread pseudo-intelligent brain worms. Reject!

[ngcazz]

I live with a feeling of nonaccomplishment, never having taken a project to completion thanks to my shitty executive function. The AI craze has robbed me of any hope that I might still meaningfully* achieve this in my career.

[axus]

Couldn't an AI help you take a project to completion, at least until you run out of money?

[ngcazz]

I didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I signed up for was writing my own software.

I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years.

That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus.

But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things?

(I hope I'm getting my idea across)

[ygjb]

You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.

I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.

Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.

Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)

Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.

[Aeolun]

The trick is to have 3 terminals with Claude Code open at the same time. You won’t be able to follow more. Reviewing the stuff or plans written is harder than telling them to write it.

[pmarreck]

> I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code

At any given time I have at least 4 terminals working on various pieces of a main project and/or side projects.

Whenever I have to wait on 1, I just flip to another. I find it very engaging because I can work on multiple pieces that all contribute to some overarching goal at the same time, concurrently.

[jcelerier]

> I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code.

Think of it like being a project manager in a team. There's a lot you can do to help the project moving forward without touching one line of code

[silh]

I would’ve become a project manager if I enjoyed that, right?

[jcelerier]

no one's preventing you to write the code yourself

[gmadsen]

Multiple projects at once or at least multiple features. I am usually the limiting factor reviewing, not waiting on agents

[ay]

I am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently;

The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a “tool for writing boilerplate”. I have tried a few ideas for agents but didn’t see how it could work.

That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it’s like magic! And if something doesn’t work - jumping into the code and debugging it is huge fun!

Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been very busy! :)

My harness doesn’t “pressure cook” since it doesn’t make sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting things from it !

The distribution of people’s moods related to AI seems indeed bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the “enthusiastic” rather than “depressed” part of it. To the folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don’t know why it is this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.

[techpression]

So you’ve tried at least a hundred ideas by now, care to share fifty of them? I’m very curious as to what they are. Opus is too slow to even complete one idea per day for me, and that’s fine, I don’t have hundreds of them :)

[ay]

I dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones that I ended up using but can’t share: a streaming radio for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server for talking with my family; a process-level virtualization based on KVM.

Of the ones I can share:

Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data https://netpoke.com - use magic code “DEMO” to see what’s it about - the source is at https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke

A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to Rust:

https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment

A study on LLM prompting techniques:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness

My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM for experiments:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat

Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack.

A true “stochastic parrot” using hash tables: https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem

These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn’t need to be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to github. Many end up thrown away.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I’m retired, so a career pivot isn’t in the cards for me.

I’m also not really in the HN gestalt, so to speak. I have some views that are common, hereabouts, and some, not so much.

I’m enjoying having an LLM “pair partner.”

[HoldOnAMinute]

Yes, it's a partner you can discuss things with, and it never belittles you or gets tired.

[krd8ssb]

I'm with you on this being incredibly exciting.

I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly.

I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was just a means to do that and the new tools with LLM and agents have allowed me to do the core of what I love way more than coding by hand could have ever allowed

[accounting2026]

Same boat (though 44M) - I don't think it has become less fun, on the contrary it can help with the stuff that was trivial but could still take time to get right. Now it can crank out that stuff often correctly on first try. Of course I have the same fear of job security as everyone else and it is sad to see something you were good at being taken over by machines, but it is not because I enjoy the work itself less, quite the contrary.

[witx]

It's so bizarre I see everyone happy using llms trained unethically, so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers

[pmarreck]

There is no strong argument that they were "trained unethically". You can google or ask an LLM to argue pro/con that claim... but of course, you haven't, since doing so would itself violate your apparent worldview.

> so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers

Bullshit (and, speaking as an old, incredibly whiny). Figuring out the right way to talk to yet another API is not the "creative and interesting part." Coming up with entirely new concepts and building them faster than I ever thought possible given that I have zero time to myself since I have a kid is literally the most "creative and interesting" thing I've experienced in my entire life. /shrug

I don't know what to say to folks like you anymore other than "byeeeeee, got too many ideas I can build now to waste time arguing with people who are simply not getting it... and maybe never got it in the first place because they got pushed into STEM instead of being cursed from the gods with it like I definitely did"

[witx]

There is plenty of proof on how these models were trained, you're just too enamored with your "more code, move faster" button to care.

That's fine no one's perfect we all look away from some things here and there, me included. But don't throw shade

[skeeter2020]

Way to blame the poster for their problems, and what the hell is a "short term career pivot"?

[pmarreck]

Who is blaming anyone?

Does someone blame the manual loom operators when automated weaving comes out? The elevator operators? The carriage drivers? The milkmen? No. So please stop reading your preconceived grievances into what I said.

I just see this as something that is not going to go away so the only rational choice is to get ahead of it and master it before it runs you over. If you love the act of creation and can adapt to a certain amount of change (or even see it as exciting), you'll be fine at this. If you have emotional hangups, well, that's irrational (no blame or judgment implied, it just... is literally irrational), and you might have to make some difficult choices that sit better with you.

I'm well-familiar with making irrational choices. I left a well-paid Microsoft shop and joined a startup and took a pay cut just so I could work with open source, years ago. It ended up paying off.

Do what your gut says. It's making the bets, after all.

And guess what. The people who have stared at code for years now are the ones who best stand to gain.

[infecto]

I don’t think anyone is blaming but it’s hard to ignore the progress we are seeing and thinks that these workflows will not be the norm in instead of the exception.

[vitaflo]

As the lead dev on our team told us "You will all have a different journey on this road". Not everyone is going to get along with allowing an LLM to write code for them, something they've probably spent their entire lives crafting a skill for. Others only saw code as a means to and end, so an LLM finally removes that silly barrier.

I'm in the former camp. Every time I have an LLM write code it makes me entirely depressed because the satisfaction I get from programming is the programming. However, what I have found incredibly valuable is having LLM's help me plan. Using it as someone to brainstorm with, to "rubber duck" if you will. I still get to code, it just speeds up the planning process and has gone from a depressing exercise to one where I am excited to work.

Find your own path.

[r_lee]

I fear that there will be a point where it won't be a choice, although a part of me wonders why there is such a hurry to get rid of devs in the first place, as these tech companies have insane margins

But I also like to work the way you described it, and also by using Claude Code for e.g. K8s stuff (kubectl, helm) where you'd otherwise have to use a TUI or do a lot of typing just to get logs/status/etc. and a bunch of yaml that is just incredibly tedious

[mekael]

The reason, and the only reason, that leadership/owners want to get rid of devs is money.

If you’re wondering who the villain is, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism.

[heddycrow]

Fear is the mind killer.

[r_lee]

So just have no fear? Then when should we have fear?

Fear is a natural response, one that in this case is perfectly appropriate imo. I don't fear for my life, but I'm not optimistic at the moment

[heddycrow]

Do what you want. I take it that it's a crime around hear to encourage people to not be afraid so shame on me.

It's a light-hearted reference to a quote from the Dune books/movies. I didn't mean it to invalidate your experience.

If anything, I was suggesting you take heart and be strong. But again, do whatever you think works for you.

Got to love this culture!

[r_lee]

I didn't mean to set you off like that?

I was just making a counterpoint, because it's easy to just say "have no fear" but I think there is a real place for at least some fear, otherwise why would that feeling exist? if you get what I mean.

I try to not fear, and I try to take it easy, but I'm also privileged to live in a country where I don't need to doordash to make ends meet.

[Tarq0n]

OP has his retirement prepared. That might increase their perception of the upsides and negate some of the downsides of adopting AI.

[ineedasername]

60 is relevant because it's inherent to the point they are making in having experienced something that inherently requires having lived through a longer period of time.

Its not uncommon for people to lose interest or find the passion has gone out of things they enjoyed when they were younger, especially in their professional lives where the enjoyment eroded through forced contact with aspects of it that were less enjoyable or contaminated by unpleasant work environments and uninteresting projects.

Having that passion reignited isn't something given to all people.

[overgard]

I'm mostly reading the comments section thinking "wow, anthropic is putting a lot of work into astroturfing Hacker News right now in reponse to the new ChatGPT release"

[JKCalhoun]

Honestly, software engineering as a career only went down hill for me from when I began to when I retired.

(And I hesitate to even air that view in front of others that are already in the field because I am a kind of Pollyanna and don't want to foment bad vibes.)

But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and responsibility that did that.

I'll drop the euphemisms and just say outright that the inmates ran the asylum when I began in the 90's (at Apple, FWIW). The only one that really told me what to do was the tech-lead on the team. Not my manager—for sure not marketing or the CEO (ha ha — Jobs had not yet returned).

In effect, I and all other engineers were told, "Here's your sandbox, here's your shovel: you go make your sand castle however you want—so long as it does X, Y and Z. We'll ship it but you'll own it. You'll fix it, expand it…"

(A coworker whose sense of humor I always enjoyed said to me, perhaps seriously, "When someone drops code in my lap and says, 'It's yours now' the first thing I do is rewrite it." Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.)

To that end I feel a little bad for anyone that missed that era. I mean unless you enjoy writing unit tests, having code reviews, style guidelines, etc.—and I have certainly met younger engineers that have come on board that seem to enjoy those aspects of the these-days profession.

I admit that when I began it was in fact a bit intimidating when you realized that code you were writing, were responsible for, was going to ship on millions (in 1995? maybe?) of machines. The responsibility though also came with agency—the combination came to give me a sense of freedom, the power of using my discretion, and finally a sense that I was a valued contributor.

You can infer from the above what I disliked about the profession as I was aging out of it. My general sense is that the industry became too big though and too much money riding on it for management to entrust it to the "funny farm". But of course we cowboys who came up in that ward liked it the way it had been.

[dahart]

> Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.

As someone who references Chesterton’s fence often, I not only agree the code often gets rewritten when someone moves on, I even think it’s often the right thing to do - for medium to small projects where there is one or only a few people who own the code. The reason is because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t rewrite it - the new owner(s) don’t have intimate knowledge of the codebase, and as a result, they work at the speed of molasses regardless of their skill. I have left code behind to people who are better coders than me, and it took years for them to become productive.

To be fair, I have also seen large projects with many people get rewritten and have Chesterton bite back hard, having the projects go late, cost enormous sums of money, and end up as bad as the first time, so rewrites certainly aren’t always called for.

This is all changing dramatically with Claude, BTW, people can now get into a codebase and be productive without rewriting it. They might not understand it, but this is a positive development of some kind at some level.

[sph]

> But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and responsibility that did that.

I've been working on a contract for a large corp. They asked me to design a piece of software over 6 months which I delivered on time and worked great — by the time we had to ship into PROD, the whole thing was canned unceremoniously.

Luckily they liked my work so much they moved me to another greenfield project. Worked on it for a year, had to invent novel solutions which I'm pretty proud of, and we shipped into prod last Autumn. I haven't heard a peep from anyone, whether the thing is working and by masterful skill of mine it hasn't crashed yet, or if no one is using it and it was just another bullshit job.

All this work, good pay, and nothing to show for it. Not even a pat in the back. I'm just a well-oiled cog in an unfathomable machine. I wonder if my career has any meaning at all. Recently they've asked me to deliver a feature for yesterday because of bad planning on their part, and when I mentioned how long it'll take, they've half-jokingly suggested to use LLMs so I can ship it in half the time to make their arbitrary deadline.

Joke's on them, in less than 6 months I'm out. 20 years as a software engineer, 15 as a contractor, and all I feel when I get at my desk is existential dread. There is just no pleasure at it, that I'd rather risk poverty but feel like my actions and efforts have tangible effects on the physical world.

Was producing more mediocre code ever the problem? This all feels like a Kafkian fever dream.

[JKCalhoun]

I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar.

It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.

And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends) and help with his lawn services business.

I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class neighborhood in a Kansas suburb… And he paid us by the hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.

But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty, overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-collar world.

To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay—I'm talking strictly about a sense of job satisfaction. (And, over the course of my three decade career as a programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I had full ownership of the code.)

[globnomulous]

I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll share it anyway:

I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a career out of that interest. The joy of programming still gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an innovator. The world of software and tech would not suffer if I had never existed. But I like the guy I work for. I like the people I work with. I write stuff that lots of people use. I do it well enough that I can feel decently good about it.

And I'm watching all of what I enjoy in software as a career and craft gradually disappear. Upper management are now all True Believer AI zealots who know, just know, that AI is the future and therefore ensure that it is also the present. They've caused nothing but organizational chaos, shoved out knowledgeable people, in some misguided effort to remake the company in their image, and replaced them with, to me, obvious bullshit artists.

Engineering time and effort that might a few years ago have produced value and good experiences for users now produce mediocre "MCPs," used only internally, that turn out even more mediocre code and tests that don't test anything.

I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have. I never could have run with you guys or made the mark on the world that you did. What I do, and the processes I follow, are probably the exact stuff that drove you to retirement. Still, I enjoy what I do and hate that it's being taken from me and replaced with something I hate, overseen, in my company's case, by vapor merchants pretending to be visionaries/cutting-edge 'thought leaders.'

I'm glad some of us got to build things when the inmates ran the asylum, and I regret the money and 'progress' that strangled the life and joy out of it for you.

Just an aside: I've really enjoyed everything you've posted on HN and look forward to your comments. Thanks, and cheers.

[JKCalhoun]

I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".

Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.

After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"

"6 months."

I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.

He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.

Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"

And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.

It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.

Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.

That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.

There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.

And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)

I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.

[skeeter2020]

When I started the things that made you good in this industry got you bullied - or worse - in high school, and we were not the ones invited to parties during university. Then with all the success and money it attracted the wrong motivations; no longer did you build software to change the world, but to get rich and change your world. And now the circle completes, as those who got rich but could not affect the geopolitical changes they wanted via their work are doing it with their money.

[tartoran]

Do you still code? What’s your take on working with LLMs and agents? Does it reignite the same spark OP is talking about?

[JKCalhoun]

"Spark" might be putting too fine a point on it if I am being honest (and I always am, ha ha).

But I vibe-coded a web site [1] that I would not have otherwise attempted (I just didn't want to have to figure out how to learn a map-type framework in order to put little points-of-interest on a web page.)

I also vote-coded an extremely esoteric app for turning .mpo files into stereograms that you can then print to display in an old-fashioned stereoscope [2].

I have lately been learning (I hope?) to build a hobbyist analog computer. This a deep dive into electronics—something I have no training in.

And I have already queued up a couple of my abandoned projects (also esoteric) that I hope to turn an LLM loose on when I free up some time (from my current analog computing obsession).

It's hard to say if I would not have pursued all the above without an LLM. I am giving examples though of projects that I feel were sort of on the tipping point for me as to whether they were worth the effort to pursue or not—the learning-curve-required vs. useful-end-product balance. I am finding the LLMs are a finger on the scale tipping it more often toward "Go for it." Maybe you would call that a "spark"?

[1] (where I map out the location of a pair of YouTubers that have been road-tripping the U.S. for over three years) https://engineersneedart.com/OneAdvanture/

[2] https://engineersneedart.com/stereographer/stereographer.htm...

[dennis_jeeves2]

>You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community

Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered to have something abnormal going on - for example autism. This is like a carpenter becoming obsessed with his chisel and deriving his entire sense of purpose and happiness from delving into the minutiae of chisels.

[anon84873628]

There is a profession called "tool maker" and their 'passion' for making tools has been quite important. Even just for chisels.

[dennis_jeeves2]

I figured that something like that would exist, hence the example.

[globnomulous]

Thanks, I needed this.

There doesn't seem to be a place for me in the future of software/tech: I like sitting quietly, alone, solving problems, writing code, and reading it. I like in code much of what I like in art: the fruits of human labor and the results of human ingenuity. Being excited about AI/LLMs makes no sense to people like me. If you're excited because LLMs let you make something, great, good for you. Have fun.

If the tools become a mandatory part of the job, I'll change careers. Spending my days talking to chipper robots and describing what I want rather than making it myself sounds unbearable.

[alsetmusic]

I debated heavily whether I'd stay in tech or change my career almost a decade ago. I concluded that the only other profession that I considered rewarding (at that time) would be to become a professor of history. Making history interesting to even one student per semester would be a win.

In the end, I remembered how much I hated schooling. This is despite being a huge fan of education. It wasn't realistic to think that I'd complete the work needed for accreditation.

Regardless, I'm happy today having selected for the thing that I already knew. I hope you also find yourself satisfied. It's lonely feeling lost when evaluating a thing you'd known through a new paradigm.

[petercooper]

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this.

This is one only data point but my dad was a programmer and frequently complained about cognitive decline once he hit his mid 50s. From talking to him, he remained sharp at a conceptual and high level, knowing what he wanted to do and how it would be done, but struggled with the tooling, the logistical details, etc. He didn't make it to the AI era, alas, but AI could be a god send for people who have the proven technical chops and background but find juggling a lot of minutiae is becoming difficult.

[kannanvijayan]

I'm sure there are cognitive declines as you age, but even discounting those there's some fundamental change happening to the opportunity space.

I'm in my mid 40s, I've had a really fulfilling career working on interesting things and making decent money, and over that time have accumulated a few passion projects that I knew were always out of my reach.

Well, technically within my reach but I'd need to somehow find someone to pay for me and a team for some period of time to work on stuff.

When I started playing around with these tools, it started feeling like maybe some of my ideas were within reach. Some time after, it felt plausible enough that I've decided to go for it. I'm actively in the middle of some deep performance research that I simply would not have the bandwidth or capacity for without these tools.

I've also managed to acquire enough confidence in the likelyhood of some degree of success that I'm investing in starting a company (self-funded) to develop and release and license the stuff i'm building.

I don't know exactly how my ideas will turn out, but that's part of the excitement and anticipation. Point is I never felt I had enough breathing room to really go for it (between normal life obligations like mortgage, feeding kids, etc.)

These tools have changed the equation enough that it's made it more feasible for me to pursue some of these ideas on my own. Things I would have shelved for the rest of my life, probably.. or maybe tried to encourage and interest others into doing.

[PaulHoule]

You feeling that way is the world telling you you’re doing it wrong.

It is more fun to treat them as coding buddies, usually using them one at a time a time, it is fair to race them at debugging a bug or spend waiting time looking at docs or something.

The real bottleneck is how much you can hold in your head simultaneously to be sure about quality as a moral subject.

[gsf_emergency_7]

Imagine 2 or more Taoist priests raised in different cultures each trying to get the others riled up while cooperating to solve a deep technical problem. How do they keep this game fun _and_ productive? Disregarding for the moment the tradeoffs---eg patience-impatience, learn-earn, purpose-technik &c--- that should replace morality-quality questions.

(Iirc there was a (nihilist) electric shock Zen meditation game that uses HRV, but the above framing may take that to another (positivist) level. Getting LLMs in the loop is one other kind of level)

Some call this the Glass-bead-game

[rprend]

I was in school when GPT came out and there is a strong generational divide. It reminds me of when i was young teachers said you couldn’t use Wikipedia because it isn’t guaranteed to be correct, but we did anyway. Same thing with LLMs. It’s a faster way to do things so eventually everything will be done that way.

[jdross]

The opposite of this has been my experience.

HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech companies, and current politics than the people I know in real life. People who mostly don’t work as professional software engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I know are all having a lot of fun too.

[sghiassy]

Been coding since 13, now 44 working in FAANG.

Love AI explaining code

Dislike AI for writing code (that was my fun part)

[tartoran]

You dont like the quality of the generated code or the process of not typing it out yourself?

[nazgob]

Process of coming up what to type was interesting to me, not the act of typing itself.

[tartoran]

It was the same to me but we haven’t fully lost the driving seat. We just moved one level higher in abstraction.

[sghiassy]

I just like writing code. It was fun

[daemonologist]

I think both opinions are pretty well-represented here, but the people who aren't so happy about generated code are well into the acceptance phase at this point. (Myself included.)

[zozbot234]

If you're "proofreading" the agents' work in detail, you're doing it wrong. You need to invest that time productively into planning out what the agents are going to do (with AI help, of course) then once the plan has gotten detailed enough you can set the agent to work and treat the result as something to just read through and quickly accept/revise/reject (upon which rejection you go back to an earlier stage of planning and revise that instead). Planning out at the outset keeps you in the driving seat and avoids frustration; the agents are just a multiplier that operates downstream of your design decisions.

[icedchai]

There is a fine line between "not proofreading" and "not paying attention at all to the output." There are many things that look like they work, but won't pass a sniff test, especially when it comes to security or performance. I witnessed agents create "private" endpoints that had no authentication, but sent user IDs as part of the payload and trusted them.

[nemo44x]

Yeah building acceptance criteria first is the way. An LLM is a goal machine. It uses probability over and over to advance towards the goal(s). That’s all it is and wants to do. So giving it well defined and granular goals and guardrails will get the best results.

[AvAn12]

Good point regarding “ survivorship bias and groupthink” here.

[munksbeer]

> there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

I've worked in professional software development for more than 20 years. I'm pretty well connected and well aware of what is going on in the industry. If you think that coding agents are not widely used and just a bubble on HN, you are very much mistaken. At this point I'd suggest more than 50% of professional developers are using them. Within a few years it will be 90%.

The reason is, they are actually good, despite what some people really want to believe.

Personally, I've been typing characters into a text editor or IDE for a long, long time. I'm very happy that I have a an automated junior programmer to do it for me now while I guide it and tell it when it is getting things wrong, and fix up mistakes. I did the manual way for a long time, I'm enjoying this new way. I understand this isn't for everyone though.