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I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really

I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(

keyle 8mo ago
Hear hear. It too shall pass. They'll get tired, they'll grind the same apps 500 times and leave. Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.
- stavros 8mo ago
  The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.
  - keyle 8mo ago
    yep, how do we define AI as a replacement for search engine, and templating engine, and inference engine (do X in Y)? is there a term for that? AI at our fingertips, accessible and useful, that's just a tool, that's not redefining us as an industry and denying people's jobs – that's an asset. (I used an em dash to prove I am not AI, as apparently double dash is now a sign of AI text!)* (*) case in point, the situation is _TIRING_.
- meetingthrower 8mo ago
  Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
  - sdf4j 8mo ago
    Curious about why the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or stuff not documented, was fixed only when vibe code was available. Was it just cost?
    - meetingthrower 8mo ago
      Cost and managerial overhead. We don't have a dev on staff. Even if we did, there is lots of managerial overhead to explain "the problem" and then iterate to a solution with a dev. Now you can just build the damn solution yourself!
    - matwood 8mo ago
      Time and thus cost. Early in my career I would look across a fairly large company at processes being ran on spreadsheets and see if it would be worth the time to create software to address and if those processes should be standardized. We barely scratched the surface with all the possible custom software opportunities for this company.
  - hexbin010 8mo ago
    A miracle! Tell us more! What kind of apps? How has it helped revenue?
    - meetingthrower 8mo ago
      Two examples: 1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day 2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 hours per week to do this in a crappy spreadsheet. Now I have it in a perfect database much more frequently. Dev time: 4 hours. We are attacking little problems all across the business now. A MIRACLE!!!!
      - hexbin010 8mo ago
- bambax 8mo ago
  Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious. "Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot. Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
pydry 8mo ago
yup. the things i disliked most about programming were hyped up bullshit and losing autonomy. These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both. I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic. The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.
retired 8mo ago
I quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day. One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.
- sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
  [dead]
- bko 8mo ago
  > artisanal code That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
  - retired 8mo ago
    [dead]
7777332215 8mo ago
Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)
- pydry 8mo ago
  >It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
  - entrox 8mo ago
    > They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly" That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
    - pydry 8mo ago
      >That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year. I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
- viking123 8mo ago
  I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better. Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
cloud8421 8mo ago
I feel the same way. The only way I found that lets me cope with this is by having 1-2 personal projects, closed source, with me as the only user, where I slowly build things the way I enjoy, and where the outcome is useful software that doesn't try to monetise at the expense of the end user.
Aromasin 8mo ago
I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem. In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite! There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.
- graykey31 8mo ago
  How do I get started with FPGAs? Coming from backend/ops/sysadmin
  - Aromasin 8mo ago
    I jumped mid-career, and there were a few places I started before diving into live hardware projects (which is the only way to go from student to practitioner). FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/ https://nandland.com/fpga-101/ Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects
lrvick 8mo ago
Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans. Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.
- rvz 8mo ago
  > Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. Might be never or if the software is not used at all. The perfect and secure software is none.
  - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
    >The perfect and secure software is none. Well, at least not connected to the internet?
    - lrvick 8mo ago
      Oh, there are plenty of ways to attack offline systems. Side channel attacks, supply chain attacks, etc. Most of my job as a security engineer is making offline systems you can actually trust.
- scirob 8mo ago
  have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not . And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
- lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
  > Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. Not as long as you think. https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats-cybersecurity-researchers/ https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...
ojr 8mo ago
I don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.
abalashov 8mo ago
Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it. A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable. AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
- miningape 8mo ago
  I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself). I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
  - abalashov 8mo ago
    I think deskilling is an underrated concern. Programming among the competent is a mind-body experience and a matter of motor memory and habits of mind, and LLMs make you extraordinarily lazy. No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation. Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.
sodapopcan 8mo ago
I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!
- 9rx 8mo ago
  > I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
  - sodapopcan 8mo ago
    I've intentionally spent my entire career as an IC. I have a few ideas but ya, I've never even done the grind. My only dependent is a pug, though, so it's not like I don't have ANY time.
- cableshaft 8mo ago
  I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans. Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already. I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games). They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one. I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game. It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun. Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing). I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.
bigpeopleareold 8mo ago
While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop! There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.) With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)
iberator 8mo ago
Once you out NOW, it's impossible to go back to entry/mod level programing jobs. :( Downshifting to some shitty minimum wage job is BRUTAL
pton_xd 8mo ago
I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down. I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
randcraw 8mo ago
Yep. After 40+ years in the business I chose to retire rather than madly pump out code using a robot. Sucked all the joy right out of the craft. It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building. It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.

I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(

keyle 8mo ago

Hear hear. It too shall pass. They'll get tired, they'll grind the same apps 500 times and leave. Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.

stavros 8mo ago
The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.
- keyle 8mo ago
  yep, how do we define AI as a replacement for search engine, and templating engine, and inference engine (do X in Y)? is there a term for that? AI at our fingertips, accessible and useful, that's just a tool, that's not redefining us as an industry and denying people's jobs – that's an asset. (I used an em dash to prove I am not AI, as apparently double dash is now a sign of AI text!)* (*) case in point, the situation is _TIRING_.
meetingthrower 8mo ago
Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
- sdf4j 8mo ago
  Curious about why the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or stuff not documented, was fixed only when vibe code was available. Was it just cost?
  - meetingthrower 8mo ago
    Cost and managerial overhead. We don't have a dev on staff. Even if we did, there is lots of managerial overhead to explain "the problem" and then iterate to a solution with a dev. Now you can just build the damn solution yourself!
  - matwood 8mo ago
    Time and thus cost. Early in my career I would look across a fairly large company at processes being ran on spreadsheets and see if it would be worth the time to create software to address and if those processes should be standardized. We barely scratched the surface with all the possible custom software opportunities for this company.
- hexbin010 8mo ago
  A miracle! Tell us more! What kind of apps? How has it helped revenue?
  - meetingthrower 8mo ago
    Two examples: 1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day 2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 hours per week to do this in a crappy spreadsheet. Now I have it in a perfect database much more frequently. Dev time: 4 hours. We are attacking little problems all across the business now. A MIRACLE!!!!
    - hexbin010 8mo ago
bambax 8mo ago
Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious. "Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
KellyCriterion 8mo ago
Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot. Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D

pydry 8mo ago

yup. the things i disliked most about programming were hyped up bullshit and losing autonomy. These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both. I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic. The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.

retired 8mo ago

I quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day. One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.

sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
[dead]
bko 8mo ago
> artisanal code That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
- retired 8mo ago
  [dead]

7777332215 8mo ago

Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)

pydry 8mo ago
>It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
- entrox 8mo ago
  > They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly" That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
  - pydry 8mo ago
    >That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year. I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
viking123 8mo ago
I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better. Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..

cloud8421 8mo ago

I feel the same way. The only way I found that lets me cope with this is by having 1-2 personal projects, closed source, with me as the only user, where I slowly build things the way I enjoy, and where the outcome is useful software that doesn't try to monetise at the expense of the end user.

Aromasin 8mo ago

I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem. In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite! There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.

graykey31 8mo ago
How do I get started with FPGAs? Coming from backend/ops/sysadmin
- Aromasin 8mo ago
  I jumped mid-career, and there were a few places I started before diving into live hardware projects (which is the only way to go from student to practitioner). FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/ https://nandland.com/fpga-101/ Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects

lrvick 8mo ago

Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans. Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.

rvz 8mo ago
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. Might be never or if the software is not used at all. The perfect and secure software is none.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  >The perfect and secure software is none. Well, at least not connected to the internet?
  - lrvick 8mo ago
    Oh, there are plenty of ways to attack offline systems. Side channel attacks, supply chain attacks, etc. Most of my job as a security engineer is making offline systems you can actually trust.
scirob 8mo ago
have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not . And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while. Not as long as you think. https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats-cybersecurity-researchers/ https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...

ojr 8mo ago

I don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.

abalashov 8mo ago

Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it. A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable. AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.

miningape 8mo ago
I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself). I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
- abalashov 8mo ago
  I think deskilling is an underrated concern. Programming among the competent is a mind-body experience and a matter of motor memory and habits of mind, and LLMs make you extraordinarily lazy. No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation. Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.

sodapopcan 8mo ago

I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!

9rx 8mo ago
> I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
- sodapopcan 8mo ago
  I've intentionally spent my entire career as an IC. I have a few ideas but ya, I've never even done the grind. My only dependent is a pug, though, so it's not like I don't have ANY time.
cableshaft 8mo ago
I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans. Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already. I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games). They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one. I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game. It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun. Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing). I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.

bigpeopleareold 8mo ago

While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop! There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.) With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)

iberator 8mo ago

Once you out NOW, it's impossible to go back to entry/mod level programing jobs. :( Downshifting to some shitty minimum wage job is BRUTAL

pton_xd 8mo ago

I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down. I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.

randcraw 8mo ago

Yep. After 40+ years in the business I chose to retire rather than madly pump out code using a robot. Sucked all the joy right out of the craft. It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building. It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.