7 ms·

50 here. Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for ev

50 here. Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn. Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing and effectively debug, yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details. It's almost an unfair unlock. It'll also be good to see leetcode die.

sean2 6mo ago
Youthful 40 here, had to comment on this: >> tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks Instead of just keeping up with the latest development frameworks, I also now have to keep up with the latest AI frameworks. I spent a week at my $ job just installing plugins, requesting permissions, debugging issues with the agents, before I went back to writing code myself (plumbing between the latest frameworks) because I'm expected to get stuff done in addition to managing agents that were supposedly going to do my work for me. My personal agentic AI coding setup never fully materialized while I have been chasing the latest crazes and I am back to handwriting my personal code too (with AI chat help) until I manage to stick to a particular setup. Anyway, I feel like the rat race just opened yet another front. And I bet I'll still be expected to leetcode in my next technical interview (still was in 2025) in addition to leetprompting or whatever the next segment on interviews will be.
game_the0ry 7mo ago
> It'll also be good to see leetcode die. Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.
- chrisweekly 7mo ago
  Still causing it!
sph 7mo ago
> Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's two weeks old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw is the cool thing around the block. My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.
- paulkrush 7mo ago
  Your comment is timeless. Just replace your tech keywords with those from the past or the future.
  - sph 7mo ago
    I’ve been around for a while. You didn’t have a game changing new framework or library every month.
- techpression 7mo ago
  Only running one agent? You should have a distributed network of them at least, if you don’t you will get left behind! Running on the cloud? Stupid, buy hardware for tens of thousands of dollars to run it locally, own your tools. Etc etc, I haven’t seen a crazier rat race in tech ever, the JavaScript framework era is looking like the most stable of software times compared to where we are right now.
rileymat2 7mo ago
> Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn. They often do solve business problems around responsive design, security and ux. Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is immense.
matsemann 7mo ago
You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.
- Cpoll 7mo ago
  You don't always have the option. AngularJS, for example, EOLed in 2021.
  - NewsaHackO 7mo ago
    It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs to angular learning a new framework.
    - taejavu 7mo ago
      At the time that’s precisely how it felt though. So much so that I personally felt it wasn’t worth it relearning everything. Had shipped several projects with AngularJS at my very first dev job, and have never written a line of Angular v2+
      - kzzzznot 7mo ago
        It confuses me when people talk about frameworks as being totally different. They solve the same problems, slightly differently. It’s not a big lift to learn a new one if you are familiar with one or two already.
        taejavu 7mo ago
        That might be generally true for frontend frameworks these days, because they’ve all converged around the same ideas. But in the mid 2010s, Backbone was very different from jQuery, which was very different from Knockout, Ember, ReactJS etc. certain frameworks embraced certain programming paradigms, others embraced others. Some of my colleagues didn’t make the jump. Those that were the most into AngularJS back then are still writing Angular apps today.
robofanatic 7mo ago
> with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year
switchbak 7mo ago
“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details” Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem. I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool. I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.
- waffletower 7mo ago
  Merges can become more fraught with multiple engineers vibe coding on the same codebase. However, LLMs will become delegates for that too.
  - switchbak 7mo ago
    Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can handle that well. I’m taking about the things you can’t easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite. And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you probably don’t have much protecting you from someone else vibing up a competing replacement either.
bartread 7mo ago
Same age, same situation. I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the web - especially when I know that knowledge will be useful for maybe, if I’m lucky, a handful of years before I have to relearn it again for some other opinionated framework. It’s just not interesting and I’ve become increasingly resentful of and uninterested in wasting time on it. Claude, on the other hand, is a massive force multiplier that enables me to focus on the parts of software development I do enjoy: solving the problems without the bother of having to type it all in (like, in days of old, I’d already solved the problem before my fingers touched the keyboard but the time-consuming bit was always typing it all in, testing and debugging - all of that is now faster but especially the typing part), focussing on use cases and user experience. And I don’t ever have to deal directly with CSS or Tailwind: I simply describe the way I want things to look and that’s how the end up looking. It’s - so far at any rate - the ultimate in declarative programming. It’s awesome, and it means I can really focus on the quality of the solution, which I’m a big fan of.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  Will be 60 this year, and have felt the same for years already. You get to a point where you look ahead and realize you've got maybe another 10-20 decent years left if you're lucky and for me, more and more, I don't want to spend it running on this treadmill. Computers do not feature at all in my ideal retirement. Maybe a phone or tablet so I can do the minimal email and bill paying.
- burnstek 6mo ago
  Yeah dude. Amen. In my 20's I could literally code a side project all day into the evening (sometimes overnight) and it was absolute serendipity. Coding in and of itself was a vibe. Then, life happened, more life happened, and eventually software development just became a career instead of a passion. Coding became a means to an end. "Resentful" is a perfect way of putting it - I may just be old and grumpy now, but I think it's sad what we as a community have done to the process of web development. It's such a circle jerk. Node in my view is the worst thing that ever happened to building web applications. Enter Claude Cowork. I've spent the past few days building an app that would have taken me weeks of time in the past. It's using a framework I've never built with, and I don't have to learn the intricacies. Shipping this to Vercel and hosting the database on Supabase is incredibly easy and it's very exciting. The only drawback so far is the unsettling fear of the unknown regarding leaking secrets and whatnot, so I'm going to have to manually audit the finished project before deploying. And here I thought my days of "side projects" were completely over.
kitd 7mo ago
Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfaction. Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their fulfilment otherwise using agents. I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.
- tech_tuna 6mo ago
  I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do." It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments". So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years. I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.
- boringg 7mo ago
  Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery and creation. Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.
newsoftheday 7mo ago
> yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.
- aklein 7mo ago
  until you learn to trust the system and free mental capacity for more useful thinking. at some point compilers became better at assembly instructions than humans. seems inevitable this will happen here. caring about the details and knowing the details are two different things.
  - leptons 7mo ago
    LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that system. And no I don't think they will "get better".
    - theshrike79 6mo ago
      How do they "lie constantly"? We are specifically talking about code here, not LLMs writing legal documents.
      - leptons 6mo ago
        I've had the LLM "lie" to me about the code it wrote many times. But "lie" and "hallucinate" are incorrect anthropomorphisms commonly used to describe LLM output. The more appropriate term would be garbage.
        theshrike79 6mo ago
        Just a basic sanity check: did the LLM have the tools to check its output for lies, hallucinations and garbage? Could it compile, run tests, linters etc and still managed to produce something that doesn't work?
ransom1538 7mo ago
You truly speak for many. I don't have the energy to center a div anymore, and to be honest, that time was thrown away [excluding money, a pretty big exclusion]. I am sure my boss's "Uber for cats" will work, I just like using AI at this point. I can iterate on 15 "Uber for cats" with 200 centered divs, spitting out documentation and excellent objects all day. But the real talk we need to have is... "Uber for cats"
Bewelge 7mo ago
I also find these things incredibly annoying. But I've been actively working in webdev the past couple of years so I was actually keeping up with stuff. And I still consider this a cheat-code. It makes it so easy to cut through the bullshit. And I've never considered myself scared of asking "stupid" questions. But after using these AI tools I've noticed that there are actually quite a few cases where I wouldn't ask (another human) a question. Two examples: - What the hell does React mean when they say "rendering"? Doesn't it just output HTML/a DOM tree and the browser does the actual rendering? Why do they call it rendering? - Why are the three vectors in transformer models named query, key & value? It doesn't really make sense, why do they call it that? In both cases it turns out, the question wasn't really that stupid. But they're not the kind of question I'd have turned to Stackoverflow for. It really is a bit like having a non-human quasi-expert on most topics at your fingertips.
jitbit 7mo ago
Turning 50 this year. Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue. And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time. I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.
- corysama 7mo ago
  Same same. When I was a young, single nerd I would happily spend a weekend coding in my cave. Now I do fun code on a laptop on the sofa with my family. I’m only typing in tiny breaks between socializing and I’m still getting lots of fun stuff done.
  - jitbit 7mo ago
    Exactly brother, mind if I hug you. I can play with my 7yo, or help the 11yo with his homework, or go for a run!! - while LLM is cooking a well-spec'ed agentic task. This sounds embarrassing, but LLMs have made our lives healthier, unbelievable. PS. Not to mention all the "boring" sh*t that I used to postpone/stretch indefinitely, like writng docs or polishing copy for my website... No more stress, no procrastination, just let the LLM do it.
    - theshrike79 6mo ago
      I've had ideas while walking with the dogs, whipped out Claude on my phone, switched to my "research" -repo (shoutout @simonw) and told it to test if the idea is viable Phone goes back in my pocket and I'll have something to read when I get back home. Literal game changer. Before those ideas just flowed through my brain and either out the other ear or got filed into "don't have time anyway shrug" and never completed or even tried.
- mlrtime 7mo ago
  >I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it. 10-20 years of coding/technology or living? Young ppl rarely get life experience/choices, youth is wasted on the young, 1000x for my own.
heresie-dabord 7mo ago
> as if solving business problems just became too boring And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole point. Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and creating is a net gain. That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is a technology that replaces thinking.
suzzer99 7mo ago
I'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech, googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I still want to understand everything I'm pasting.
- YZF 7mo ago
  There is a lot more Claude Code can do for you that an AI chat bot can't because it a) has tool access b) has access to your source code. - Root cause and fix failures. - Run any code "what if scenario". - Performance optimizations. - Refactor. There's no reason why you shouldn't (and you should) read all the code and understand it after Claude does any work for you but the experience vs. the "old" SO model of looking for some technical detail is very different.
Frost1x 7mo ago
Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work. Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.
firemelt 6mo ago
agree with u papa, fuck leetcode!
grb423 6mo ago
[dead]

sean2 6mo ago

Youthful 40 here, had to comment on this: >> tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks Instead of just keeping up with the latest development frameworks, I also now have to keep up with the latest AI frameworks. I spent a week at my $ job just installing plugins, requesting permissions, debugging issues with the agents, before I went back to writing code myself (plumbing between the latest frameworks) because I'm expected to get stuff done in addition to managing agents that were supposedly going to do my work for me. My personal agentic AI coding setup never fully materialized while I have been chasing the latest crazes and I am back to handwriting my personal code too (with AI chat help) until I manage to stick to a particular setup. Anyway, I feel like the rat race just opened yet another front. And I bet I'll still be expected to leetcode in my next technical interview (still was in 2025) in addition to leetprompting or whatever the next segment on interviews will be.

game_the0ry 7mo ago

> It'll also be good to see leetcode die. Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.

chrisweekly 7mo ago
Still causing it!

sph 7mo ago

> Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's two weeks old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw is the cool thing around the block. My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.

paulkrush 7mo ago
Your comment is timeless. Just replace your tech keywords with those from the past or the future.
- sph 7mo ago
  I’ve been around for a while. You didn’t have a game changing new framework or library every month.
techpression 7mo ago
Only running one agent? You should have a distributed network of them at least, if you don’t you will get left behind! Running on the cloud? Stupid, buy hardware for tens of thousands of dollars to run it locally, own your tools. Etc etc, I haven’t seen a crazier rat race in tech ever, the JavaScript framework era is looking like the most stable of software times compared to where we are right now.

rileymat2 7mo ago

> Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn. They often do solve business problems around responsive design, security and ux. Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is immense.

matsemann 7mo ago

You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.

Cpoll 7mo ago
You don't always have the option. AngularJS, for example, EOLed in 2021.
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs to angular learning a new framework.
  - taejavu 7mo ago
    At the time that’s precisely how it felt though. So much so that I personally felt it wasn’t worth it relearning everything. Had shipped several projects with AngularJS at my very first dev job, and have never written a line of Angular v2+
    - kzzzznot 7mo ago
      It confuses me when people talk about frameworks as being totally different. They solve the same problems, slightly differently. It’s not a big lift to learn a new one if you are familiar with one or two already.
      - taejavu 7mo ago
        That might be generally true for frontend frameworks these days, because they’ve all converged around the same ideas. But in the mid 2010s, Backbone was very different from jQuery, which was very different from Knockout, Ember, ReactJS etc. certain frameworks embraced certain programming paradigms, others embraced others. Some of my colleagues didn’t make the jump. Those that were the most into AngularJS back then are still writing Angular apps today.

robofanatic 7mo ago

> with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year

switchbak 7mo ago

“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details” Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem. I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool. I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.

waffletower 7mo ago
Merges can become more fraught with multiple engineers vibe coding on the same codebase. However, LLMs will become delegates for that too.
- switchbak 7mo ago
  Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can handle that well. I’m taking about the things you can’t easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite. And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you probably don’t have much protecting you from someone else vibing up a competing replacement either.

bartread 7mo ago

Same age, same situation. I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the web - especially when I know that knowledge will be useful for maybe, if I’m lucky, a handful of years before I have to relearn it again for some other opinionated framework. It’s just not interesting and I’ve become increasingly resentful of and uninterested in wasting time on it. Claude, on the other hand, is a massive force multiplier that enables me to focus on the parts of software development I do enjoy: solving the problems without the bother of having to type it all in (like, in days of old, I’d already solved the problem before my fingers touched the keyboard but the time-consuming bit was always typing it all in, testing and debugging - all of that is now faster but especially the typing part), focussing on use cases and user experience. And I don’t ever have to deal directly with CSS or Tailwind: I simply describe the way I want things to look and that’s how the end up looking. It’s - so far at any rate - the ultimate in declarative programming. It’s awesome, and it means I can really focus on the quality of the solution, which I’m a big fan of.

SoftTalker 7mo ago
Will be 60 this year, and have felt the same for years already. You get to a point where you look ahead and realize you've got maybe another 10-20 decent years left if you're lucky and for me, more and more, I don't want to spend it running on this treadmill. Computers do not feature at all in my ideal retirement. Maybe a phone or tablet so I can do the minimal email and bill paying.
burnstek 6mo ago
Yeah dude. Amen. In my 20's I could literally code a side project all day into the evening (sometimes overnight) and it was absolute serendipity. Coding in and of itself was a vibe. Then, life happened, more life happened, and eventually software development just became a career instead of a passion. Coding became a means to an end. "Resentful" is a perfect way of putting it - I may just be old and grumpy now, but I think it's sad what we as a community have done to the process of web development. It's such a circle jerk. Node in my view is the worst thing that ever happened to building web applications. Enter Claude Cowork. I've spent the past few days building an app that would have taken me weeks of time in the past. It's using a framework I've never built with, and I don't have to learn the intricacies. Shipping this to Vercel and hosting the database on Supabase is incredibly easy and it's very exciting. The only drawback so far is the unsettling fear of the unknown regarding leaking secrets and whatnot, so I'm going to have to manually audit the finished project before deploying. And here I thought my days of "side projects" were completely over.

kitd 7mo ago

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfaction. Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their fulfilment otherwise using agents. I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.

tech_tuna 6mo ago
I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do." It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments". So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years. I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.
boringg 7mo ago
Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery and creation. Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.

newsoftheday 7mo ago

> yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.

aklein 7mo ago
until you learn to trust the system and free mental capacity for more useful thinking. at some point compilers became better at assembly instructions than humans. seems inevitable this will happen here. caring about the details and knowing the details are two different things.
- leptons 7mo ago
  LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that system. And no I don't think they will "get better".
  - theshrike79 6mo ago
    How do they "lie constantly"? We are specifically talking about code here, not LLMs writing legal documents.
    - leptons 6mo ago
      I've had the LLM "lie" to me about the code it wrote many times. But "lie" and "hallucinate" are incorrect anthropomorphisms commonly used to describe LLM output. The more appropriate term would be garbage.
      - theshrike79 6mo ago
        Just a basic sanity check: did the LLM have the tools to check its output for lies, hallucinations and garbage? Could it compile, run tests, linters etc and still managed to produce something that doesn't work?

ransom1538 7mo ago

You truly speak for many. I don't have the energy to center a div anymore, and to be honest, that time was thrown away [excluding money, a pretty big exclusion]. I am sure my boss's "Uber for cats" will work, I just like using AI at this point. I can iterate on 15 "Uber for cats" with 200 centered divs, spitting out documentation and excellent objects all day. But the real talk we need to have is... "Uber for cats"

Bewelge 7mo ago

I also find these things incredibly annoying. But I've been actively working in webdev the past couple of years so I was actually keeping up with stuff. And I still consider this a cheat-code. It makes it so easy to cut through the bullshit. And I've never considered myself scared of asking "stupid" questions. But after using these AI tools I've noticed that there are actually quite a few cases where I wouldn't ask (another human) a question. Two examples: - What the hell does React mean when they say "rendering"? Doesn't it just output HTML/a DOM tree and the browser does the actual rendering? Why do they call it rendering? - Why are the three vectors in transformer models named query, key & value? It doesn't really make sense, why do they call it that? In both cases it turns out, the question wasn't really that stupid. But they're not the kind of question I'd have turned to Stackoverflow for. It really is a bit like having a non-human quasi-expert on most topics at your fingertips.

jitbit 7mo ago

Turning 50 this year. Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue. And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time. I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.

corysama 7mo ago
Same same. When I was a young, single nerd I would happily spend a weekend coding in my cave. Now I do fun code on a laptop on the sofa with my family. I’m only typing in tiny breaks between socializing and I’m still getting lots of fun stuff done.
- jitbit 7mo ago
  Exactly brother, mind if I hug you. I can play with my 7yo, or help the 11yo with his homework, or go for a run!! - while LLM is cooking a well-spec'ed agentic task. This sounds embarrassing, but LLMs have made our lives healthier, unbelievable. PS. Not to mention all the "boring" sh*t that I used to postpone/stretch indefinitely, like writng docs or polishing copy for my website... No more stress, no procrastination, just let the LLM do it.
  - theshrike79 6mo ago
    I've had ideas while walking with the dogs, whipped out Claude on my phone, switched to my "research" -repo (shoutout @simonw) and told it to test if the idea is viable Phone goes back in my pocket and I'll have something to read when I get back home. Literal game changer. Before those ideas just flowed through my brain and either out the other ear or got filed into "don't have time anyway shrug" and never completed or even tried.
mlrtime 7mo ago
>I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it. 10-20 years of coding/technology or living? Young ppl rarely get life experience/choices, youth is wasted on the young, 1000x for my own.

heresie-dabord 7mo ago

> as if solving business problems just became too boring And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole point. Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and creating is a net gain. That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is a technology that replaces thinking.

suzzer99 7mo ago

I'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech, googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I still want to understand everything I'm pasting.

YZF 7mo ago
There is a lot more Claude Code can do for you that an AI chat bot can't because it a) has tool access b) has access to your source code. - Root cause and fix failures. - Run any code "what if scenario". - Performance optimizations. - Refactor. There's no reason why you shouldn't (and you should) read all the code and understand it after Claude does any work for you but the experience vs. the "old" SO model of looking for some technical detail is very different.

Frost1x 7mo ago

Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work. Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.

firemelt 6mo ago

agree with u papa, fuck leetcode!

grb423 6mo ago

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