[simonw]

If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software.

I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that.

Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.

[trjordan]

There's a neat / weird ladder that I keep seeing friends go through as they work through this.

- Volume. Kill the backlog! 8 agents in terminals, frantically!

- Ambition. Do the things you always want to do! You have the power!

- Clarity. Oh god I have to figure out what to do next.

That last one is honestly super-hard, but it's also the most valuable. Like, do you want to wake up every day and find new work, because you understand the machine better than everybody else? I know a bunch of people that love that stuff, but also a bunch that don't. I totally get that the transition is hard.

https://tern.sh/blog/volume-ambition-clarity/

[mohsen1]

This is the right take. I wouldn't dare to write a TypeScript compiler a year ago but now I'm trying it and I have to say this has taught me so much about compilers, Rust and performance overall that wouldn't be possible before. It's a lot of fun to embrace the new technology and do bigger things.

Doing this sort of project is giving me a glimpse of what it is going to be like managing software projects. As software engineers we have to learn how to manage much bigger changes and in a much higher level of abstraction. I personally don't think models are good enough for this level of automation yet but in a weekend that I had access to Fable I could see how things are going to change soon. Most of criticism towards LLM coding was not applicable to Fable. I'm not hyping anything, just an observation.

The DJ analogy is useful actually. I live in Berlin and essentially everyone is a DJ but only a few get to make money from it. The difference is of course taste but also grit and how well those people leverage available tools to them. A good DJ knows how to use the tools and has a good understanding of the market. Different skill that a musician but nevertheless a valuable skill

https://github.com/tsz-org/tsz

[evanelias]

> The DJ analogy is useful actually.

Maybe, but the author's DJ analogy in the post was rather off the mark. Skill-wise, DJing is actually a perfect example of "it used to be hard" in pretty much every aspect -- beatmatching on vinyl, mixing in key, discovering new records, building and reaching a fanbase, getting distribution for mixes, physically carrying tons of records around and sometimes getting them stolen or damaged.

If everyone is a DJ now, it's because software and technology has made it so much easier than it used to be. Although to be clear, I completely agree with your comment on how successful DJs are the ones who leverage modern tools and understand the market.

But in terms of the analogy in the original post, the author is making some weird comparison between guitar players and DJs, which is totally apples to oranges... not to mention that selling out stadiums solo has never been easy for anyone, regardless of year or whether you're a guitar player or a DJ.

[iliveinberlin]

I live in Berlin and not everyone is a DJ. You just live in DJ circles. Everyone I know is a vulture capitalist. There's a lot of room for monetisation in this city.

[randysalami]

Yes! And more projects. And you have the freedom to try and fail.

Was thinking of a comparison, cars are faster than walking. Imagine saying, no I prefer only walking. It is healthier than sitting in a car and your legs will atrophy. That is very much true (and we can see the consequences in car dominated societies). Nevertheless, for many industries cars are very important. You don’t say, I would rather carry all these pallets by hand rather than use a forklift.

LLMs are similar in my mind. They turbocharge your output in all senses but is less holistic than hand-coding. Like cars, you are making a trade off but I don’t think it’s fully a replacement. We still walk with cars in our lives. And we don’t eschew cars because they are “worse” for you than walking. We adapt and make tradeoffs

[davidw]

You only have as much freedom as you can buy from a handful of huge corporations.

[simonw]

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

... or Google Gemma or Mistral.

[davidw]

Aren't those widely regarded as 'not as good', because right now LLM's are a game of "who has the most resources wins"? And even those require very high end personal computers.

The freedom pendulum looks like it swung away from individuals.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100

[simonw]

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

[RetroTechie]

You see more detail when you move slower.

[_praf]

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

(huge fan of your blog/pelicans btw)

[simonw]

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

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

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

[qsort]

Agreed, I don't know if it's going to stay like this forever, but right now, if anything, the difference is amplified. You can make unbelivable stuff happen through the sheer power of knowing what you're doing.

[pupppet]

Great as long as you have the flexibility to choose your own projects..

[simonw]

There's never been a better time to be independent of an employer!

[kukkeliskuu]

I feel the same. More projects, more ambitious projects. I would have not been able to even imagine sone of the things I am building now, not to talk about implementhing them alone.