Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good.
With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.
Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.
Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.
If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.
And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.
The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.
> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.
This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.
It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
"not everybody" vs "50 year old business guys...months of focused chats" - I don't think you're really disagreeing here? That's also a niche population. One that knows their domain very well, absolutely, personally I think it's cool that they can DIY what they need. But still a niche population. That's not your proverbial 20year old kid right out of school with ADHD pumping out world class software.
Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.
I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone.
And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.
In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are.
AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.
The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.
I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.
I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.
The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable.
In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.
The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.
However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.
I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.
I don’t see the analogy? AI is not preventing the craftsman programmer from coding. Your compiler hasn’t stopped “yielding fruit”, so to speak.
The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?
I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.
In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics.
So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
I think it captures it perfectly, and the question is what are tomatoes here. Is it being challenged intellectually and proud of solving a puzzle, or is it getting praised, valued or paid?
People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.
The nuance here is that people aren't good at evaluating their own work/progress, and use recognition as a proxy milestone of their own improvement. No matter how good they get, they don't "feel" good until someone else (or many someones) comes and tells them "you're good"
Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
Exactly. Motivation is rarely a question of either/or (art for art's sake / art for recognition). And for many practitioners, being part of a community of fellow artists who "know the struggle" is also part of the fun.
There will always be communities of people who want to handcraft everything, who will be available to commiserate about the struggle of their craft. We still have people doing crazy shit like collecting/smelting iron by hand and smithing it into swords (which will literally never be used).
"Knowing the struggle" is/was a massive part of my enjoyment of programming. I used to love browsing Github just to see what people were building and really appreciating clever ideas or the amount of work required to make something, especially when it's something of limited commercial value. Now I feel like I've lost that. So it's not just that I don't get appreciation for my work but I find it's harder to appreciate other people's work.
I don't think that an artist or game developer wanting recognition is the problem here. I think it's the reflection of their intentions on the consumer in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to separate the cash grabs from the craft.
"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."
People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.
There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".
But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.
This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it.
Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.
Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.
I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.
Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....
LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
I really don't get the hate.
Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.
I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes
Each step removed one more piece of friction.
I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.
All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?
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I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers...
The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.
With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...
That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.
I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.
I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse.
Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
What I do for work, isn't the same as what I do for fun.
I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.
At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.
So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.
There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.
So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.
> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.
Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.
If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling.
If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.
Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks.
Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?
It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.
I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...
Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough.
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
One thing to note is that as soon as Suno figured out hiphop artists were making $150,000 a year spewing AI songs onto Spotify, they imposed a 60 song per month download limit to stop that.
It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.
I'm too young to have known the assembly wizard world, but how is the job market for people of that skill-set and expertise?
My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
If one works in AI it's quite lucrative because shaving off a couple percent is worth the big bucks. But increasingly, there is enough training data for LLMs to do the same thing because the number of unique computations is fairly small.
As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.
But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?
I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?
They are not saying the assembly is bad all the time, but merely that sometimes, for some inputs, the assembly is bad. Which is definitely true, though I would prefer the term "suboptimal."
Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
Not to derail the conversation, but the concept of money itself is on loose screws. One might argue that compute and energy (dare I say expressed in BTC?) is arguably the (world reserve) currency of the future. The current system discounts the value of the hours of the artist based on where that artist was born, rather than on merit, and is the source of a lot of problems including trade wars, extreme globalization, offshoring, mercantilism and the entire industrial stripping of developed nations by those who purposely keep their currencies low and exploit their own population.
You can say it, and there's no reason you shouldn't dare say it, but getting other people to believe it is a whole other story. Good luck with that. Guess we know what's in your wallet :)
Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?
I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd.
Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least.
Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?
This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"?
it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is.
That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?
*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
Sorry if it came off as combative. The points I made are not mutually exclusive but they are in some cases. There is a difference between someone that chose computer science because Silicon Valley was the next Wallstreet, or someone who has been tinkering out of sheer curiosity since elementary school.
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
I've observed this dichotomy myself. Some people will make things because they enjoy the experience of making. Others make things because they enjoy achieving an outcome- happy client, open source community, a new useful tool for themselves, whatever the case may be.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.
There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.
I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments are kind of vague for me to guess what's the driving force.
For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise, makes people's live better.
But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally.
Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.
What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.
I stopped reviewing the code at all.
People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.
My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.
It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
My impression with how the wind is blowing is that someone is going to come along, if your app has merit, and duplicate it with Astra/Fable. Then they'd back it with significant ad spend, outcompeting yours.
>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.
He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.
It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you.
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
Vice City was released nearly 25 years ago! Also it's a game, so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. If you count the unique 'features' (or systems) of Vice City, you might find it's a comparable count to the number of features of a medium-sized mobile app.
You are joking right ? renderer, audio, math, physics, animation, AI, asset streaming,.... in addition to the gameplay itself, and you compare it to a medium-sized mobile app ???
Apps usually have tons of boilerplate, so pure LoC may be similar. But in density, no contest. I recently dug up an old objc app of mine and was shocked how few lines it took to send a REST request, parse and process it. Nowadays it is split into multiple files, usecases, repositories, protocols to accomplish the same. All in the name of testability or architectural “correctness”. Write that in a game and you’re fired because it kills performance.
Me too I use my apps every day. But the main thing coming out of this is that they are tailored to me. Turning hobbies into hustles is one of the worse things that happened in the post social media days.
>there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it
This means you designed the system well and made sure the agent implemented it correctly. Even at Big Company the big shot architects don't review every line of code, and nobody seemed to mind that
It’s just a fact that an ai will write and read faster than me. I can’t compete so getting ai to do that has freed up both time and mental capacity to actually think about the implementation details.
I'd like to think it comes down to my expertise, but I don't believe I did a lot of designing.
Sure, I've given a lot of inputs over the time, probably I've steered it to solutions that work.
Maybe it was also helpful that I set up a skill to use a different model to review the code for correctness, technical debt, and whether the location where the code is added is appropriate or warrants a new file or abstraction.
I set this up long before subagents were widely used.
The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.
OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”
The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.
You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby.
Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.
Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.
I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
My love for the craft has been slowly dwindling for the last 15 years but since AI it’s totally crashed. I’m still doing it for the paycheck but not much of it is enjoyable at this point
This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.
The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility.
I don't know. Maybe it's the people doing software dev that are yet to reckon with it to a degree -- or have found themselves on opposite sides of denial.
I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.
> I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
I don't really think there is very strong evidence that the ROI is good.
The problem is that the industry is riddled with FOMO and FUD: everyone thinks everyone else is using it so they must. And this FUD and FOMO is being imposed upon them from above: there is a mandate to be afraid and fearful you're not using AI enough.
Even I, a burned out freelancer who once used to be happiest writing code, have to accept that if I return to my career, I must develop ways to use AI to keep up with people who are clearly already using it indiscriminately (or at best over-optimistically). And I must develop ways to talk to potential clients about the aspects of indiscriminate AI use that they should care about, and about the value of stepping back from one-shotted ideas.
I am trying to operate without FOMO and to see past FUD, but I accept I am compelled to do that or quit.
I think SWEs can't unionize for very different reasons, and that if you hang out on HN long enough you will develop a deeper understanding about why. But I am not restarting that discussion beyond saying this, because it always makes my head hurt!
You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change.
AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now.
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective.
I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.
I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.
For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.
Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
That is almost to say that the only part of the project that matters is the code. But the code is only a tiny part. I take joy in describing the thing and bringing that vision to life.
I agree if you one-shot something, but that hasn't been my experience at all (unless the initial prompt is so detailed that creating it took considerable time).
For me it's more like being a chef but having a cook to cut up things and start cooking them, but you decide when it's done, what spices to put, and how to serve it - arguably the most fun and creative part.
Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me?
If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age.
(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)
Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.
In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.
I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.
On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.
I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.
The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.
Currently this post is sitting at the top spot on HN. But I suspect it's going to disappear from the frontpage. I have observed this happening with posts that are critical of AI. Most of these post still appear on /active but they disappear from front page.
I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.
I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.
Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
This article's note about game making 100% wrong, games are highly "complex" and there's a lot of iterative refinement and experimentation that is involved in "finding the fun." You can't just throw a pot of well liked mechanics together, because without balance or the right context it'll be flat. Also, unlike music where people often like something that's mostly derivative with some slight stylistic tweaks, if a game is derivative people will just keep playing the thing it's derived from.
The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
I spend so much more time with generative IA thinking and iterating over design details (or even overall design) than before, when part was consumed by writing the implementation.
Bots are often terrible and/or don’t have all your requirements available on this subject, or even your are discovering them along the way and you don’t all the time want the recommendation of the machine.
From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.
The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
Since I am currently using AI to make a game engine, I feel like I am sort of qualified to say something on the topic, and I don’t think it’s really true that AI’s can just roll one out without a lot of poking. They constantly go off on the wrong track and I have no faith that they’d get anywhere sensible without a human steering the whole thing (for now anyway).
But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.
That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.
Yep. AI can probably make your marketing website or REST service on autopilot. Or even small minigame experiences.
But go outside the bounds of median programming and AI becomes increasingly scatterbrained. It requires a lot of guidance to successfully build high performance, novel software. I still find it more productive though - I can work on three tasks simultaneously with AI, and only one if I’m manually working on a single algorithm. It’s very much like running a team of well-read junior developers.
I love how LLMs transformed my daily routine at work.
So far I have more time coding what I want and get paid for it while Claude writes the boring Spring 2 Crud for me.
This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
For the last couple of years, I've been crafting and shipping a free app that Serves a particular narrow demographic. It works extremely well, but is a native iOS app (I don't write Android). When I first developed it, I worked with a professional graphic designer, and the app has a unique UX. In fact, with the latest release, I had to "walk back" a bit of the stuff the designer did, as I believe it interfered with usability. It's really a pretty intense app. There's a lot of moving parts. It handles user data, so I have to make sure it's secure and high-Quality.
Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.
At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.
Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.
I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.
I'm basically looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
Have you considered setting up an agent environment like codex and having it work making on Android version for you? I know you said it's a very complex app and that probably makes it seem like it wouldn't be able to, but LLMs are really good when they have a very clearly defined end state to work toward, like an existing iOS app with code, screenshots etc.
I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.
The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
The issue is that I store user data. Also, the users of the app are a very privacy-sensitive demographic. That raises the stakes, considerably.
I can't just "vibe code" an app that does the same thing mine does. It needs to be vetted by a good native Android developer that I trust, and that gets expensive.
Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.
I've had some form of this conversation several times in the past few months:
Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."
Them: "But I like writing code!"
Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.
Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.
None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
I actually do enjoy writing code , it’s like a puzzle to be solved and I get a hit every time I solve it. But after we started generating all code with AI at work, I feel very inefficient writing code by hand on my hobby projects. I still do it but I have become too aware now of every little struggle, like a beginner, since I know I could just pull up a Claude session at any moment and get over with it by telling it as much as “finish this thing for me”. It will know exactly what I was doing just by looking at the working tree and likely won’t even need to ask questions. I also know that without asking AI for a review, I am almost certainly introducing bugs all over that the AI could prevent. And that my tests will never be as thorough as AI written tests. So I am not sure how long I will be able to keep writing even my hobby code by hand. Perhaps hand written code will become a super niche field for certain things and I will find a place where that is still needed, but that is pure speculation. From what I see right now, it’s a matter of a year or so for me to just not be able to endure the grind of writing code by hand even if I would like to. I think this will eventually catch up with everyone, not just me and most of the industry which already moved on to fully AI generated code… but even the last Mohicans, like the Zig guys, will have to eventually give up on their no ai stance.
> Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Yep, this is what I realised. I like solving a problem/fixing something. I am not really interested in hooking up a Go/Python/C# web service to a database for the umpteenth time.
I've been partially vibe-coding a new desktop environment for Linux and creating my own UI framework. I know how UI frameworks generally work, and I know how desktop environments generally work. What I want to do is build a DE that works well and fits my vision of how it should work functionally.
I am reasonable at C++ (I don't do it professionally). Do I want to spend 20 hours doing a load of UI boilerplate code in C++? No, I don't. I am sure I can do it, I've written UI frameworks before in other languages. But I get the machine to do all the boring stuff, and I develop the product. If the code it starts churning out is crap, I have the ability to fix it.
There seems to be a lot of crap about not being able to code after using AI for a few months. This is rubbish. I used to code when I was a kid in BBC BASIC and didn't for years, I then started coding again in my early 20s and all of the stuff I learned came back to me, and I was programming in Java. Same recently, I didn't program for about 4 months and had to program without the AI as the AI couldn't solve what I was doing, and I was fine.
Maybe a tangent, but I've gotten a lot of the joy back with 3D printing. You can just describe something, and Astra can model it in CAD extremely well. It usually takes a few iterations, and then you can just print it. I found that before, it would take days to build even simple models in Tinkercad - which while fun, was high enough friction that a lot of things would stay in the "ideas" folder - now I can have something real in an hour or two.
I've only found one answer to the "creative work" struggle now, after code writing as an art seems to have died.
Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.
What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does exactly the things you wrote! And there is a precise, predictable relationship between the code and what it does, which you can fully understand and reason about!
Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world.
2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.
I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.
So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
1 combines with 2 because you can think about what changes to make to your code, and then that changed version runs. This is different from instructing an LLM to change something for you, where you have no insight in the underlying artifact being changed, or can’t predict what and how exactly the LLM will change it.
1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential.
The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.
Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
I've tried finding a middleground with using coding agents. I mostly get them to show me documentation or examples of how to do something, rather than do the thing. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just ask opencode to make the change, but most times I do it myself. Has kept me happy
These articles are frustrating on HN because it's quite common for programmers to tinker on small projects in solitude, so when artists complain about ai you get all these "just make stuff for your own sake, or where you in it for the fame?" reactions.
I like the craft but I enjoy making products more. Working for 5 years on some tool chain/libraries has been great in terms of “technical” satisfaction but it would have been even more rewarding to build successful products with all that.
And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.
Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
Yes, AI shines as a hybrid tool for hyper-generalists or multi-domain experts that can leverage their deep knowledge across various fields but lack the raw hours to execute everything themselves. Strong developers who never knew how to manage a team but should have been product owners based on their broad knowledge and vision of the product and industry.
I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.
I can create the programming part of the game. I have done a couple. Where it stops working for me is at the visual assets. And especially sewing the code to the art.
Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.
It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.
So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?
> Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
I personally went through the authors dilemma but came out different. I personally don’t care for the writing by hand, but absolutely do read every line produced by AI, because I take pride it a well designed and easy to understand system; well designed abstractions. I’m able to build better and easier to understand software (with better tests!) then I ever was before.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me.
The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.
I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.
I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
> And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.
There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.
And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.
But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.
Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy".
It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.
Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.
Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.
Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.
Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
The problem with what you're saying is there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale. There is also no clear pathway to "this opens up more jobs". This is not a tool the same way an electric saw is a tool. An electric saw replaces a physical thing that we do (manually sawing), but AI replaces our thinking and intelligence.
I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.
Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.
Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.
That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).
Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time?
Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.
It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.
99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.
I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? The gaming industry is, to a huge extent, just an optimisation problem for MBAs running the major publishers. Most gamers don't really value creativity, but easy rewards and familiar tropes in eternal regurgitation. AI is going to be able to pump out a never-ending stream to satisfy that market rather sooner than later.
That obviously still leaves some space for the occasional streak of creativity or very talented game devs, but that is by and large just a tiny sliver of the industry even today.
Yeah those games exist, and most gamers don’t want them. We’ve not been able to convince the industry to stop bothering to make them, so they still do dumb stuff like, making Concorde, then realising nobody wants it.
Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.
So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage!
Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:
https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game so got his blessing for a web remake)
AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.
My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.
An art analogy:
Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.
If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.
The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.
Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.
For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.
This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.
And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.
The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.
Edit:
The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.
I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.
That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
My friends and I have been asking this exact question lately. I’m sure people are still working on interesting things that AREN’T AI. I too would love a HN-minus-AI.
I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software.
I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.
My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??
Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.
Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).
I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.
I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.
So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.
There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.
I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.
Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise.
Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.
Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.
Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too.
It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!
On the (well written!) post's particulars:
I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).
But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.
Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.
Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.
*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
With AI story telling, lot of people can tell their stories. Democratization of story telling. Earlier we just used words, now people can make others imagine the words with AI art. Honestly I want the best story to win. Anybody can be a storyteller.
With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.
Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.
Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.
If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.
And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.
The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.
Tons of opportunity at every corner.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
Just what the world needed. 100s new SaaS churned by AI.
And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.
AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.
I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.
I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.
The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.
The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.
However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.
I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.
The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?
So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."
People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.
There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".
But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.
Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.
Interesting mix.
Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.
I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.
Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....
LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
I really don't get the hate.
Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.
I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes
Each step removed one more piece of friction.
I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.
All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?
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I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.
With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...
That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.
I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.
I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.
At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.
So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.
There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.
So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.
I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.
Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.
If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?
It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.
I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
A good question.
It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.
My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.
But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?
I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?
https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.
Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?
*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments are kind of vague for me to guess what's the driving force.
For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise, makes people's live better.
But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.
What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.
I stopped reviewing the code at all.
People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.
My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.
It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
You might not be aware of this, but you've answered the question - just indirectly.
Call me suspicious.
Should I post my market and keyword research too, here on this site for software developers and entrepreneurs?
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
I don't think I am less of a 'hacker' or programmer than the next person on HN.
This means you designed the system well and made sure the agent implemented it correctly. Even at Big Company the big shot architects don't review every line of code, and nobody seemed to mind that
Sure, I've given a lot of inputs over the time, probably I've steered it to solutions that work.
Maybe it was also helpful that I set up a skill to use a different model to review the code for correctness, technical debt, and whether the location where the code is added is appropriate or warrants a new file or abstraction. I set this up long before subagents were widely used.
The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.
OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”
The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.
You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.
Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.
I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.
The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility.
I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.
No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
I don't really think there is very strong evidence that the ROI is good.
The problem is that the industry is riddled with FOMO and FUD: everyone thinks everyone else is using it so they must. And this FUD and FOMO is being imposed upon them from above: there is a mandate to be afraid and fearful you're not using AI enough.
Even I, a burned out freelancer who once used to be happiest writing code, have to accept that if I return to my career, I must develop ways to use AI to keep up with people who are clearly already using it indiscriminately (or at best over-optimistically). And I must develop ways to talk to potential clients about the aspects of indiscriminate AI use that they should care about, and about the value of stepping back from one-shotted ideas.
I am trying to operate without FOMO and to see past FUD, but I accept I am compelled to do that or quit.
I think SWEs can't unionize for very different reasons, and that if you hang out on HN long enough you will develop a deeper understanding about why. But I am not restarting that discussion beyond saying this, because it always makes my head hurt!
AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.
For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.
Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
So much this.
I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM.
It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.
For me it's more like being a chef but having a cook to cut up things and start cooking them, but you decide when it's done, what spices to put, and how to serve it - arguably the most fun and creative part.
What’s intellectually “mine” is the task anyway, not the code.
You should be able to strip all the creative intelligence out of the code and what you’d have there is a prompt.
If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)
Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.
In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.
I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.
https://art.joeldare.com
On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.
I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.
The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.
https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box
I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.
I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.
Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.
The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.
That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.
A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013
Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.
At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.
Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.
I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.
I'm basically looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.
The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
The issue is that I store user data. Also, the users of the app are a very privacy-sensitive demographic. That raises the stakes, considerably.
I can't just "vibe code" an app that does the same thing mine does. It needs to be vetted by a good native Android developer that I trust, and that gets expensive.
Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."
Them: "But I like writing code!"
Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.
Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.
None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
Yep, this is what I realised. I like solving a problem/fixing something. I am not really interested in hooking up a Go/Python/C# web service to a database for the umpteenth time.
I've been partially vibe-coding a new desktop environment for Linux and creating my own UI framework. I know how UI frameworks generally work, and I know how desktop environments generally work. What I want to do is build a DE that works well and fits my vision of how it should work functionally.
I am reasonable at C++ (I don't do it professionally). Do I want to spend 20 hours doing a load of UI boilerplate code in C++? No, I don't. I am sure I can do it, I've written UI frameworks before in other languages. But I get the machine to do all the boring stuff, and I develop the product. If the code it starts churning out is crap, I have the ability to fix it.
There seems to be a lot of crap about not being able to code after using AI for a few months. This is rubbish. I used to code when I was a kid in BBC BASIC and didn't for years, I then started coding again in my early 20s and all of the stuff I learned came back to me, and I was programming in Java. Same recently, I didn't program for about 4 months and had to program without the AI as the AI couldn't solve what I was doing, and I was fine.
Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.
Give it a go!
Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.
I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.
So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential.
The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.
And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.
Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.
Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.
It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.
I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.
I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
This was never true, otherwise "stealth startups" wouldn't have been a thing.
This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.
There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.
And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.
But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.
Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.
Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.
Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.
Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.
Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
Then there was a time when the "workforce" was mostly actual slaves.
There was a time when entire cities all died of sickness, 100% mortality.
Yes, more change has happened. And more is coming. Just how it is. The post WWII era was the exception. Ride the wave.
Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.
Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.
That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).
Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.
It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.
99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.
I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
That obviously still leaves some space for the occasional streak of creativity or very talented game devs, but that is by and large just a tiny sliver of the industry even today.
Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.
Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:
https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game so got his blessing for a web remake)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade
https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/
https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know)
https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz
https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com
https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version)
https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web
https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/
https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP)
https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web
https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream
https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream
An art analogy:
Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.
If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.
The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.
Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.
For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.
This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.
And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.
The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.
Edit:
The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.
I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.
That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
It’s fine to keep apprised of, but I really do miss the actually-genuinely-interesting topics and projects which used to pop up here, pre ai days.
I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.
My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??
Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.
Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).
I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.
I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.
So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.
There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.
I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.
Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.
And it’s awesome.
It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!
On the (well written!) post's particulars:
I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).
But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.
Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.
Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.
*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.