[ramon156]

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good.

> opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option.

I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.

I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my current state.

[meowface]

I and my friends go back and forth, every day, on whether coding with LLMs is a net plus or a net negative.

I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer.

I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This is in some ways the worst of both worlds, but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia while still getting pretty good code out, so I consider it superior to how I worked before. I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.

[pdimitar]

I am with you here but don't get overly pessimistic: devising hooks and stopgaps and flows and constantly tuning what to watch out for does not only improve the quality of the LLM-output code. It hones and refines your own abilities.

CC has made some pretty dumb stuff in my projects but I don't resent those occurrences. They taught me (more accurately: reminded me, because I already knew but was not applying that knowledge too often) very valuable lessons on code quality -- that's still a dark area to this day and every ray of light on it is valuable for the future programming.

To me programming with LLMs made me a better programmer. But yes, I don't just rubber-stamp PRs.

It also finally allowed me to be less of a code monkey and more of an architect and a backend lead than before. Which I was really missing.

[_verandaguy]

    > I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.

I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping to go back to school in 2027 and be out of work that revolves around programming in 5 years.

I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.

[endemic]

What are you going to do? Asking for a friend.

[_verandaguy]

I'm still trying to figure that out. Something diplomacy-adjacent would be interesting to me; maybe conflict studies, or international relations.

Based on word from my friends who work in the field, a lot of it is people who have a lot of respect for the field, and a lot of professional respect for eachother. It's also a field I feel is unlikely to suffer from the same kind of scams that are taking over software while still offering an engaging environment.

It's also work with real-world impact, which is nice, though obviously comes with its challenges.

[crymeth0t]

> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.

Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"

[Devasta]

> I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs.

I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did.

Nowadays I see people doing far more in a month than I could in a year and I feel like its all a waste, like I just spent the past few years transcribing a phonebook while standing next to a photocopier.

I don't know if that'll ever change. I can't even pretend I was doing something prestigious and artisan like watchmaking because I wasn't a good programmer beforehand.

[enoch_r]

This piece changed how I work with LLMs and made me much more optimistic about how "fun" it can be to work with them: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/05/25/using-ai-to-write-better-...

Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.

[warmwaffles]

The fun part about that `grill-me` command is that when the questions are over, I've found that I can go right into implementation without needing to dump a PRD or some sort of broken up plan. Now this is obviously completely predicated on what you are asking it to grill you on. But for tasks that are semi complicated, it's fantastic.

[xpct]

I used to think I'll be into coding for the long haul, contributing to open source, and working on multi-year side projects.

Nearly all of that passion vanished this year, and I've been struggling to replace it. I know I'm much better than the machine now, but the lines are starting to blur, and some of the small puzzles of day-to-day have been completely automated away.

We've birthed a lot of puzzle solvers that enjoyed programming, and I'm sure many of them will move on to something else that scratches the same itch. I'm keen on learning what that will turn out to be.

[cavoirom]

Be your customer, write the software just for you, AI is so effective that you could do something meaningful for you just in spare tine.

Here is the similar perspective: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html

I was misunderstood you if you intend to write code by hand, I still did, I use AI to learn by example, but I write the real code myself, AI can help me improve the code. I learned a lot.

[fartcoin67]

I'm the opposite, couldn't be bothered to work on code outside of work. Barely did at work because I was more focused on wrangling a small army of shitty contractors (thanks strategic partner initiative for firing all of our small shop contractors and replacing them with morons from "offshore").

Now with LLMs I find myself doing small projects that interest me or have some utility for me outside of work, and doing a lot more development in the codebases at work outside of just review/docs/arch than I was before. Also making small tools that I find pleasant/useful but were not important enough to spend time on before.

[foobar10000]

Agreed - there was always a set of things I wanted to do that I knew the magic core for, but wanted a team of implementers for the curft, the 100k of actual testing harnesses, hyperparameter exploration, etc.. . I now have that team of implementers. All the problems seem research-y though - optimal binary transport systems that are zero-copy and compatible with languages, fast physical simulation optimizers, etc etc... So, things that all had a _LOT_ of busywork around the magic core.

[flir]

If money is no object, you could have it play code golf. "Make this shorter, but still pass all the tests".

This is not a serious suggestion.