I don't like AI coding, but I can't say it's not useful. Most of the arguments in this article can be disarmed by taking the abstraction "one step up". LLM generated modules and software, microservices, whatever your level of abstraction... now need to be composited together. You go and deal with higher order problems, factories, generation, etc.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
> I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life.
This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
Like using a calculator. I use one, but I still use paper math too, and calculate manageable sums/multiplications in my head. I'd feel dull otherwise.
GPS. I use one, but I still pay attention to the route and keep a sense of direction. “Why bother knowing where you are when the machine can tell you?” isn't really an argument for outsourcing your own brain.
Or more generally: it’s perhaps not the best idea to make the entirety of your reasoning ability dependant on something external to you. Doubly so if that’s a tool with a subscription model.
The reason I do maths in my head is that the interface to anything else is still not good enough, or at least my handling of it isn't. Looking and handling a phone takes me out of the situation in a way that feels worse than doing the thing in my head.
If it didn't, if the neural computer interface was real and seamless, I would use that for sure. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't even notice.
When you hand code you build an incremental understanding of how the code works. This can be very valuable in cases where precision is needed and change is costly.
The skill of using LLMs for code generation is in recognising these scenarios; knowing when to use it and when to not.
Washing machine suppliers don't charge per wash, per month nor are at the risk of disappearing off the planet due to trillions of dollars of fraudulent circular investment. Thus I don't think I need to worry about the washboard at the moment.
I think this can be extended. Wasting time playing music or drawing or writing by hand would also be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
There is so many things that AIs can do just as well and much faster. Not just coding but all other kinds of things in art and craft. Like why sculpt anything by hand when you can just get AI do model and then 3d print it.
Washing by hand, both dishes and clothes, as well as drying them "old school" are all skills I found very practical to keep even if rarely used (hand washing dishes is pretty common when for me though if I only have one or two items...)
Meal? Washing machine wash clothes, dishwashers wash dishes, so something may have been lost in translation.
And even so, the energy efficiency of modern dishwashers with turbidity sensors is very good, and actually can be more efficient than hand-washing, especially if that requires multiple bowls full of water.
Obviously there are limits, but if you stack during the day and stick it on overnight, then it's pretty efficient, even for a single person.
> This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
Stop with these terrible comparisons. Code is (mostly) expected to keep working and be maintainable for lots of time following its inception. If your clothes are clean and not destroyed, the task is complete.
Not really a good comparison, sometimes I still quickly use the washboard than load up the washing machine when all is needed is a quick rinse, or when the washing machine is running and I don't want to leave a mess.
I get what you're going for, but it's not a good comparison.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.
agree.
1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.
I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
I felt a sense of kinship because your thoughts are so similar to mine. These days on HN, people say AI coding is so bad, but it has its advantages too. If you look at just the code blocks, it really writes better than most people (of course, global consistency is weaker). Hearing your story, I was surprised that what drew me to your comment was how similar our thinking is.
I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.
I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.
I like AI coding. I was talking about this with a writer friend: what I get paid for is my judgement. Which goals are worth pursuing and which aren't? We always knew tech is all tradeoffs all the way down, so how are they to be evaluated? My writer friend faces similar challenges. AI doesn't have an order of values within which to weigh judgements, except for whichever one is implicitly ir explicitly imposed upon it. I also don't think that LLM context works the same way my reflective process works, as far as I can tell. It's much better at the activity of coding than I am and that's great, I'm happy to let it do that. I've never found it capable of independently making the kinds of judgements that are the meat of my writer friend's and my professions.
I like coding. You can take away my AWK and C, Bash and Go and Javascript (yes I even enjoy coding Javascript unironically, sue me. I like making self-contained HTML5 one-file-and-offline tools for fun) only from my cold, dead hands. But don't we get one of these articles like once a week at least? It's getting kind of tiresome.
Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?
Same here, regardless of my endless C rants, if the option is writing markdown files for a machine to do my work, or be stuck writing C until retirement age, I pick writing C.
It's one person's personal blog. You can complain that you see too many of one type of blog entry, but that's a result of whatever happens to be upvoted.
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically.
I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.
2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.
Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.
1. No because a compiler solves a problem introduced by multiple architectures, it's NOT automatically a higher language. Also its deterministic. If you run the same version compiler, same flags, the result will always be the same and is guaranteed to do (maybe optimized) what you told it to do.
2. Good for you and i wont criticize this take. My life is A LOT about sitting in front of a computer writing useful and/or fun code though and i love it!
I am not sure if I am more tired of people building with AI or people complaining about people building with AI. If you really that bothered, there is nothing stoping anybody from keep doing things the good old way... What's the big deal?
They’re looking for reassurance to avoid fear. The same way we all do when we see that someone has been in a freak auto accident, we try and find some way to tell ourselves “oh, that wouldn’t happen to me”
I don't understand the point of this article. It is written poorly. It doesn't state a purpose or line of thought, you can infer it from how he counters the dislike reasons, but then was the point of the article just to list a handful of reasons you don't believe to be true? Because he's leaving so much stuff behind
There are a lot of similar articles to this recently, and there will be many more. There will also be many articles with the opposite view. Both are interesting and offer different viewpoints to what is the biggest software engineers' existential crisis.
I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design
I think the employment thief point is always misstated.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
> We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
Asking seriously and not in a provocative way: are you then implying that without those inventions we would have much more people employed as white collars? Employed people that would live a better life in economical and life/work balance terms.
We would yes. I'm mostly reflecting on the historical grounds for the current situation. New technology didn't mean the swathes of the population that were made redundant got magically hoovered up into other professions. The redirected revenue went straight into leadership and investment pockets.
My mother is a good example. She was a corporate typist for years, on typewriters. Eventually word processing took over. Good fortune for her that she invested in this privately, but many people didn't because they didn't have the capital to buy a computer to learn on and the corporation didn't provide training. They saw it as a way to reduce that department cost by the 10:1 improvement. She got kept on, 10 people didn't. And most of them ended up as unemployed housewives or moving back in with their parents under serious financial consequences.
If we did the same work but didn't have those things, we would need more people employed to make up for it. But if we didn't have those things these days, we probably would have less companies doing this sort of thing.
If we didnt have word processors or templated document generation, we would have people who write things properly, typeset documents etc. If we didnt have compilers etc, we would have people who translated higher level languages into machine code
Because the invention of the compiler brought software and tools outside of million dollar IBM computer rooms. Which in turn brought more productivity elsewhere and thus a positive economical impact. This argument fails with AI because if everyone can do it, nobody will pay for it.
> A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent.
which is precisely why this tech has become so invasive in the software industry, the majority's thinking capabilities were mediocre to begin with. Good code was held in place by a few good men and women working as tech leads.
I am also tired of the "We now have bigger picture problems to solve instead". If your code looked like spaghetti, so are your big picture solutions. As a matter of fact, big picture problems are much harder than writing a stupid function.
> The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.
Edit: I was wrong. Marx makes both claims because his theory is just not that great.
Is Karl Marx an authority on the matter? If one famous person in the 1800s says something, is one to take it that they are correct, forever, and that noone can express any view contrary to theirs?
He also wrote literally the opposite to what you put in his mouth, so not only is this an appeal to authority, it's a completely incorrect one. Wonderful.
> It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence [...] in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers
I think Marx said that it'd do that "under communism". While "under capitalism" technology is merely a labour-value-creation amplifier for the robber barrons (capitalists). The capitalists are afraid of other capitalists using tech to undercut their prices, so they loose market -- hence they end up in some sort of tech-arms-race.
Do you know the phrase: fully automated luxury communism?
First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that. If nothing else, I find talking to AIs to be exhausting.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding-boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a superhuman machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
> First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
False, Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
> Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
Sam Altman says a lot of things, most of which seem to benefit Sam Altman. And Google used to tell me that they wouldn't be evil. Facebook probably said some noble-sounding nonsense at some point, too.
> Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to the Neanderthals: We could do every job better than they could, and now there are no more Neanderthals. So I wouldn't like a future where two companies make machines that outcompete humans at every job.
Which is why I say we can adapt to this, but only if it stops advancing soon.
“ My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. ”
I just showed how it’s not true.
In your Neanderthals example: would you have chosen to negotiate with Neanderthals to stop making tools and coordinate and stay technologically backward? Thats what you seem to suggest here.
> AI Companies as Bad Actors
> If you believe that the big AI companies is [sic] run by people who don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart
I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.
> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.
It seems like a very lazy attempt to rebut the reasons. In particular:
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience).
Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.
Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.
Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.
M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software. People who can still do that can still get paid by organisations that need that to be done.
It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.
I don't like AI coding, but I can't say it's not useful. Most of the arguments in this article can be disarmed by taking the abstraction "one step up". LLM generated modules and software, microservices, whatever your level of abstraction... now need to be composited together. You go and deal with higher order problems, factories, generation, etc.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
> I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life.
This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
How about you compare like to like? Hmmm.
Like using a calculator. I use one, but I still use paper math too, and calculate manageable sums/multiplications in my head. I'd feel dull otherwise.
GPS. I use one, but I still pay attention to the route and keep a sense of direction. “Why bother knowing where you are when the machine can tell you?” isn't really an argument for outsourcing your own brain.
Or more generally: it’s perhaps not the best idea to make the entirety of your reasoning ability dependant on something external to you. Doubly so if that’s a tool with a subscription model.
The reason I do maths in my head is that the interface to anything else is still not good enough, or at least my handling of it isn't. Looking and handling a phone takes me out of the situation in a way that feels worse than doing the thing in my head.
If it didn't, if the neural computer interface was real and seamless, I would use that for sure. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't even notice.
I don't think your example is any better or more common. You're the first person I've heard who does math on paper to stay sharp.
Just because your math skills are atrophying, doesn't mean others are.
When you hand code you build an incremental understanding of how the code works. This can be very valuable in cases where precision is needed and change is costly.
The skill of using LLMs for code generation is in recognising these scenarios; knowing when to use it and when to not.
Washing machine suppliers don't charge per wash, per month nor are at the risk of disappearing off the planet due to trillions of dollars of fraudulent circular investment. Thus I don't think I need to worry about the washboard at the moment.
I think this can be extended. Wasting time playing music or drawing or writing by hand would also be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
There is so many things that AIs can do just as well and much faster. Not just coding but all other kinds of things in art and craft. Like why sculpt anything by hand when you can just get AI do model and then 3d print it.
The answer is very different if it's a job or a hobby.
Washing by hand, both dishes and clothes, as well as drying them "old school" are all skills I found very practical to keep even if rarely used (hand washing dishes is pretty common when for me though if I only have one or two items...)
Using the washing machine for a single person meal is a waste of planet resources.
Meal? Washing machine wash clothes, dishwashers wash dishes, so something may have been lost in translation.
And even so, the energy efficiency of modern dishwashers with turbidity sensors is very good, and actually can be more efficient than hand-washing, especially if that requires multiple bowls full of water.
Obviously there are limits, but if you stack during the day and stick it on overnight, then it's pretty efficient, even for a single person.
He means to wash clothes. You're thinking about the dishwasher.
I don't even know how many years I have been hearing this now
> This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
Stop with these terrible comparisons. Code is (mostly) expected to keep working and be maintainable for lots of time following its inception. If your clothes are clean and not destroyed, the task is complete.
Not really a good comparison, sometimes I still quickly use the washboard than load up the washing machine when all is needed is a quick rinse, or when the washing machine is running and I don't want to leave a mess.
I get what you're going for, but it's not a good comparison.
> Code as Art
Code is code.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
This kind of mindset baffles me.
I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.
Demoscene
Code can be efficient, code can be readable, code be maintainable... or none of those.
Art? While me and my colleagues had their own little style differences, I wouldn't call it art.
agree. 1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result. 2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/the-hardest-part-of-usi...
I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
I felt a sense of kinship because your thoughts are so similar to mine. These days on HN, people say AI coding is so bad, but it has its advantages too. If you look at just the code blocks, it really writes better than most people (of course, global consistency is weaker). Hearing your story, I was surprised that what drew me to your comment was how similar our thinking is.
I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.
I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.
I like AI coding. I was talking about this with a writer friend: what I get paid for is my judgement. Which goals are worth pursuing and which aren't? We always knew tech is all tradeoffs all the way down, so how are they to be evaluated? My writer friend faces similar challenges. AI doesn't have an order of values within which to weigh judgements, except for whichever one is implicitly ir explicitly imposed upon it. I also don't think that LLM context works the same way my reflective process works, as far as I can tell. It's much better at the activity of coding than I am and that's great, I'm happy to let it do that. I've never found it capable of independently making the kinds of judgements that are the meat of my writer friend's and my professions.
I like coding. You can take away my AWK and C, Bash and Go and Javascript (yes I even enjoy coding Javascript unironically, sue me. I like making self-contained HTML5 one-file-and-offline tools for fun) only from my cold, dead hands. But don't we get one of these articles like once a week at least? It's getting kind of tiresome.
Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?
Same here, regardless of my endless C rants, if the option is writing markdown files for a machine to do my work, or be stuck writing C until retirement age, I pick writing C.
It's one person's personal blog. You can complain that you see too many of one type of blog entry, but that's a result of whatever happens to be upvoted.
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
My say about this
1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically. I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.
2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.
Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.
Life is SHORT
1. No because a compiler solves a problem introduced by multiple architectures, it's NOT automatically a higher language. Also its deterministic. If you run the same version compiler, same flags, the result will always be the same and is guaranteed to do (maybe optimized) what you told it to do.
2. Good for you and i wont criticize this take. My life is A LOT about sitting in front of a computer writing useful and/or fun code though and i love it!
Whether or not LLMs are deterministic is irrelevant to this discussion. It doesn't make what the parent poster say less true.
unless the flow is taking you to place where theres nothing to eat... then life is really short.
I am not sure if I am more tired of people building with AI or people complaining about people building with AI. If you really that bothered, there is nothing stoping anybody from keep doing things the good old way... What's the big deal?
They’re looking for reassurance to avoid fear. The same way we all do when we see that someone has been in a freak auto accident, we try and find some way to tell ourselves “oh, that wouldn’t happen to me”
This article is in favor of using LLMs.
Mate have you seen how much AI is stuffed in your face? You don't have to look too far, just look at the code editors.
I don't understand the point of this article. It is written poorly. It doesn't state a purpose or line of thought, you can infer it from how he counters the dislike reasons, but then was the point of the article just to list a handful of reasons you don't believe to be true? Because he's leaving so much stuff behind
There are a lot of similar articles to this recently, and there will be many more. There will also be many articles with the opposite view. Both are interesting and offer different viewpoints to what is the biggest software engineers' existential crisis.
I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design
I think the employment thief point is always misstated.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
Everthing is fucking broken.
> We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
Asking seriously and not in a provocative way: are you then implying that without those inventions we would have much more people employed as white collars? Employed people that would live a better life in economical and life/work balance terms.
We would yes. I'm mostly reflecting on the historical grounds for the current situation. New technology didn't mean the swathes of the population that were made redundant got magically hoovered up into other professions. The redirected revenue went straight into leadership and investment pockets.
My mother is a good example. She was a corporate typist for years, on typewriters. Eventually word processing took over. Good fortune for her that she invested in this privately, but many people didn't because they didn't have the capital to buy a computer to learn on and the corporation didn't provide training. They saw it as a way to reduce that department cost by the 10:1 improvement. She got kept on, 10 people didn't. And most of them ended up as unemployed housewives or moving back in with their parents under serious financial consequences.
If we did the same work but didn't have those things, we would need more people employed to make up for it. But if we didn't have those things these days, we probably would have less companies doing this sort of thing.
If we didnt have word processors or templated document generation, we would have people who write things properly, typeset documents etc. If we didnt have compilers etc, we would have people who translated higher level languages into machine code
Because the invention of the compiler brought software and tools outside of million dollar IBM computer rooms. Which in turn brought more productivity elsewhere and thus a positive economical impact. This argument fails with AI because if everyone can do it, nobody will pay for it.
> A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent.
which is precisely why this tech has become so invasive in the software industry, the majority's thinking capabilities were mediocre to begin with. Good code was held in place by a few good men and women working as tech leads.
I am also tired of the "We now have bigger picture problems to solve instead". If your code looked like spaghetti, so are your big picture solutions. As a matter of fact, big picture problems are much harder than writing a stupid function.
> The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.
Edit: I was wrong. Marx makes both claims because his theory is just not that great.
Is Karl Marx an authority on the matter? If one famous person in the 1800s says something, is one to take it that they are correct, forever, and that noone can express any view contrary to theirs?
He also wrote literally the opposite to what you put in his mouth, so not only is this an appeal to authority, it's a completely incorrect one. Wonderful.
> It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence [...] in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers
[1]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
Karl Marx actually made both of my points.
I think Marx said that it'd do that "under communism". While "under capitalism" technology is merely a labour-value-creation amplifier for the robber barrons (capitalists). The capitalists are afraid of other capitalists using tech to undercut their prices, so they loose market -- hence they end up in some sort of tech-arms-race.
Do you know the phrase: fully automated luxury communism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
It would be interesting to see the linked talk "Useing You're Type's Good", but it seems to have been deleted.
It's still available here: https://archive.org/details/usetypes.
The original URL has been dead for over five years, so I don't know why a blog post from yesterday linked to it.
First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that. If nothing else, I find talking to AIs to be exhausting.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding-boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a superhuman machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
> First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
False, Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
> Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
Sam Altman says a lot of things, most of which seem to benefit Sam Altman. And Google used to tell me that they wouldn't be evil. Facebook probably said some noble-sounding nonsense at some point, too.
> Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to the Neanderthals: We could do every job better than they could, and now there are no more Neanderthals. So I wouldn't like a future where two companies make machines that outcompete humans at every job.
Which is why I say we can adapt to this, but only if it stops advancing soon.
You said this
“ My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. ”
I just showed how it’s not true.
In your Neanderthals example: would you have chosen to negotiate with Neanderthals to stop making tools and coordinate and stay technologically backward? Thats what you seem to suggest here.
> AI Companies as Bad Actors > If you believe that the big AI companies is [sic] run by people who don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart
I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.
> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.
It seems like a very lazy attempt to rebut the reasons. In particular:
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
I wonder how the author feels about the fact that the code powering his blog (making it accessible to readers) was very likely written by AI.
There is a disappointing lack of revolutionary spirit, to value labour directly instead of for the things it provides us.
Demand food, shelter, leisure, purpose. Jobs are one (honestly pretty bad) implementation of that
Who's labor are you demanding there? If somebody doesn't want to give you the food they've grown what are you going to do about it?
> Who's labor are you demanding there?
OpenAI's
> If somebody doesn't want to give you the food they've grown what are you going to do about it?
Well, die probably. That's why people are upset.
2 cents.
Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience). Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.
Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.
Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.
M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software. People who can still do that can still get paid by organisations that need that to be done.
It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.
> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software.
It all boils down to this really. How you get there is kind of irrelevant, unless it isn't because of privacy and copyright concerns and such.
Amen!
Karl Marx thinks that we get LGBTQ rights and end of slavery because of technology.
If you oppose AI, you basically stop future such progressive ideas from permeating.
Why would you, as a progressive, reject AI if you are interested in progress?