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I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisi

by simonw 5d ago

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill any more, you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left, and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. If you don't want your profession to change at all then you're going to have a tough time with this - but that's surely been true for the history of software engineering? Has there ever been any stability to the tools and language we use beyond about a five year time horizon? These changes are happening a bit faster, but if you chose software development as a passion you've opted into pretty frequent radical change from the start.

sonicrocketman 5d ago
I feel the same and have gone through a similar journey.
testaccount121 5d ago
Simon, you stole from me a fulfilling career of hand crafting pelican svgs.
slowin 5d ago
> The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. I think it depends on the person. I've been waiting for AI since I first saw Wargames as a child. As soon as I saw that agents could code at or beyond my level, it felt like the entire world was unlocked. Now I can explore so many ideas that I was bottle-necked on with my own time to write the code before. I would consider myself a technologist and it's a very exciting time to explore what technology can do. I loved writing code, but mostly because creating something that tapped the power of tech was my goal. Now I can achieve that goal 100x and it feels like a superpower.
- qarl 5d ago
  > it feels like a superpower I say "it feels like flying." People worry that I'm too enthusiastic about AI. My obvious answer is - wouldn't you love to fly too?
  - notpachet 5d ago
    There's a mythological story about the hubris of flying; I'm sure Claude can pull it up for you.
    - qarl 5d ago
      HA! Yes, too true.
  - bornfreddy 5d ago
    I already did, before AI: import antigravity
- cortesoft 5d ago
  This is exactly how I feel, and I have been trying to think how to articulate it. I love programming, and have loved it ever since I read the first page of my BASIC programming book 35 years ago and learned how to write a PRINT statement. I remember running into my parent's room as an 8 year old, telling them I knew how to make the computer print something. It was so exciting. I have never lost that excitement, but my love is not just about programming. It is about technology in general. I love the idea of having smart machines, and being able to use them to do stuff, and the power you can have when you automate something. I love being able to come up with an idea about how a machine can do what I want, and then how that means it can do it over and over without tiring. I loved technology in science fiction. My family watched Star Trek: The Next Generation from the first episode until the last. I loved Data, I loved the ships computer, I loved the holodeck. I dreamed about having those. I was so excited when I spent way too much money to buy the very first Oculus Rift dev kit, because it felt so much closer to the holodeck than anything I had experienced before. I have felt that way about AI. I was astonished by the first ChatGPT I used. It was amazing! The first programming AI I tried was github's copilot, and I was already astonished. It was able to complete the function I needed! How did it know what I wanted to do? I continue to be amazed at every advancement. I remember the first time I tried Claude, and I had it write me a connect 4 engine in Rust (writing connect 4 engines is one of my standard 'new language' routines), and it did it! I have felt closer to living in Star Trek these last couple of years than ever before. Telling the computer what you want, seeing the response, and refining what you are asking for is how I dreamed of using a computer since I saw them do that on the Enterprise. And here I am, doing it! I like computers and programming because I like technology, and I like seeing it advance into areas that seemed impossible before. I love the fact that the 'Tasks' XKCD that I loved to quote for so many years when non-programmers would talk about a programming idea (https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/) has become completely obsolete; now anyone could spin up a bird identifying app in a few hours. What was 'virtually impossible' is now routine. THAT is the thing I love, not writing code. I mean, I DO love writing code, but I love getting my machines to do what I want even more. I can't wait until robotics become more mainstream. I can't wait to have a machine that can clean my bathrooms and do my laundry and cooke me dinner. I can already imagine the routines I will develop, and the new ways of combining those skills I will come up with when these things are invented. Or hell, maybe I will join one of the companies working on those things and move that field forward. There is no end to what technology can do, and I am so excited to see what is next.
erqtw1 5d ago
The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability. There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! This is defeatist propaganda.
- hax0ron3 5d ago
  The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.
- simonw 5d ago
  > given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance. My comment here is meant to be the opposite of defeatist propaganda! I'm arguing that those of us with skills and experience are becoming more, not less valuable.
  - 1234-asdv 5d ago
    It is strange then that those with skills and experience apparently refrain from building websites, since all AI websites are worse than any non-SEO website before 2023. There isn't a single one that is good, and one that was built by a web framework developer whom I shall not name uses 100% CPU for a static website. The point of this is that AI is unnecessary and makes products worse even with experienced people operating the AI.
willchis 5d ago
This is where I'm at mentally... but also it was quite nice for an army of us to get paid six figure salaries to chug along creating React components and sitting in 3 hour retrospectives ;) The ladder has certainly been raised.
- sidrag22 5d ago
  To me it just fills like a bit more of a demand to be a generalist, or be really good at pairing with other specialists.
deleted 5d ago
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bitexploder 5d ago
Someone was probably sad when they saw a compiler work for the first time after years of writing assembly. AI is intellectually different, progressing, and has no visible horizon, but in my life technology never did in computing. The point is that technology changes often. I think having a couple of decades in tech makes the shock easier to absorb in many ways. And also harder regarding something so familiar becoming so rapidly irrelevant. But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.
Sivart13 5d ago
> a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread. It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.
gh0stcat 5d ago
I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of those who are writing code daily.
- cmrdporcupine 5d ago
  What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through, and it was frankly amazing that we lasted this long without getting hit with it. The consequences aren't great, no. However it was always inevitable because of the way our economy runs. So the finger should not be pointed at AI, but instead the forces that will harness it in certain ways. That might be impossible to tackle at an individual level, and might feel futile... but so is blaming AI.
  - brazukadev 5d ago
    > What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through Many of those trades still exist and some got even in higher demand, they just use software.
- simonw 5d ago
  > Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? The rate at which I'm learning has gone up. I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work. I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrating to work that way now. As a result I'm out of practice at it. I expect if someone waved a magic wand and eliminated all forms of LLM and coding agents from the world I would have a couple of less productive months spinning back up on my hand-crafted coding skills again.
notpachet 5d ago
There's a larger existential crisis still in store for you. Our global civilization is collapsing. We are choking to death on the unchecked negative externalities of our own progress. It is our species' Achilles heel. Whether or not an individual developer adapts to this temporary capability blip (agentic coding) will not matter in the long run. The systems necessary for supporting these capabilities are too brittle to survive the century.
- deleted 5d ago
  [deleted]
- willchis 5d ago
  I keep mentioning to people that last winter parts of the arctic were 10C hotter than the average for the last 100 years and I get blank looks.
  - mike_hearn 5d ago
    Where did you get that from? This must be relying on picking very specific parts of the Arctic. This year has not been unusual for the Arctic, in fact, it was colder than the normally cited average (1958-2002). Take a look, see for yourself: https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!) Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back. https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter... Greenland mass balance was entirely average and is currently at the top end of the known observations, it seems: https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
    - willchis 5d ago
      Go to your first link, click on 2025 and look at the winter values (Nov/Dec).
palmotea 5d ago
> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. Two important things you didn't address: 1. Quality-of-life 2. Economic security I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic security (in a way that increases inequality) and make my work simultaneously more intense and less satisfying. I may be in a better position than a new-grad comp sci major, but the effects are a net negative. That doesn't make me happy or excited. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'm also unhappy for the new-grad comp sci majors, too. I think one thing you can say for sure, is AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way, despite any propaganda to the contrary. It's deeply anti-human, and serves other inhuman mechanisms first and foremost. A relatively small number of people are building it to just see what happens and maybe win the lottery in the process, and everyone else has to deal with the consequences of that (which, by the way, is why data centers are so hated: it's not the first we've been through something like this and almost everyone is sick of it).
- chasd00 5d ago
  > AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
  - palmotea 5d ago
    What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it. AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that. Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.
discreteevent 5d ago
> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477
- simonw 5d ago
  Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it. That particular reference isn't fair though. You need to view that comment in context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944 The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time. Just today, Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) tweeted that "Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human": https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577 https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577 I'm entirely in agreement with that. The interesting challenge is how we achieve that new high bar.
  - mwcampbell 4d ago
    I don't actually buy that tweet from Boris Cherny. When the Claude Code source leaked some months ago, there were many posts on Mastodon about how the revealed code was a shit show, a big pile of hacks. I wish now that I had bookmarked some of those posts.
    - simonw 4d ago
      Here's the one I saw most widely cited: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 I wasn't very impressed by that pile-on, personally. Has there ever been a rapidly evolving 1,000,000+ line codebase that suitably motivated critics couldn't pick a thousand holes in and conclude that the code was garbage? Claude Code is used by millions of people on a daily basis, has generated billions of dollars in revenue, and spits out new features on a weekly basis. Many of the complaints I saw - things like the absurdity of asking for JSON and then looping against a schema until it matches - are common patterns for building software against language models, which are weird components to need to tame.
xnx 5d ago
> set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left Definitely true at this exact moment, but very uncertain that AI won't also outrun those other areas faster than even existing experts.
- simonw 5d ago
  You need expertise to productively use that AI. Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless. Now imagine someone with no existing web knowledge trying to get Claude to build them a Progressive Web App with offline capabilities that uses SQLite compiled to WASM. Moon language.
  - xnx 5d ago
    > You need expertise to productively use that AI. Certainly true now, but might not be in 2 years. Similar to how a person can hire a lawyer or a carpenter without knowing anything about those fields. Knowing what you want (even expressed imprecisely) might be all that is needed.
Verdex 5d ago
> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)
hintymad 5d ago
Maybe the real threat is that our industry has been stalled for years, or to put it more politely, that it has been mature for a while. Back before 2010 or so, people actually read books like The Art of Computer Programming, the Dragon Book on compilers, and the Lions’ Book on Unix, or followed sites like lambda-the-ultimate.org. Then sites like High Scalability became popular. Not that everyone studied them cover to cover, but plenty of engineers considered them essential reading. Yet long before LLMs came along, that kind of depth had clearly become niche. The creator of High Scalability even put the site up for sale. Whenever someone posts an article titled "Top X Data Structures for Y," every single structure mentioned was invented decades ago. If most of what we do now is just slice and dice abstractions created and refined by previous generations, we are really just relying on our once-unique ability to transfer knowledge - something AI is rapidly replacing. This isn't unique to software engineering. In Renaissance Italy, mathematicians like Tartaglia and Fior hoarded cubic formula shortcuts like proprietary algorithms and challenged rivals to public math duels. Today, we solve cubic equations without a second thought. Special functions used to be a staple college course for physics and engineering majors. Are they still? The US military used to employ thousands of people just to calculate PDEs by hand. Do we need anyone doing that today? Our only hope is that our society moves fast enough to create new demands and problem domains that genuinely require new systems and algorithms. Look at AI: it’s evolving rapidly, driving massive demand, and forcing the development of new systems and architectures. As a result, the lucky few[1] working at that frontier are having rewarding careers. Without frontiers like that, the rest of us risk becoming irrelevant. [1] One unfortunate factor is that building AI now requires lots of capital for accessing GPUs, which means individuals in the open source community have a hard time working on it.
ericmcer 5d ago
I am wondering how this will effect other industries more. We are pretty flexible as software engineers because our skillset needs to constantly evolve. For a lawyer or radiologist or anyone who has been able to do the same thing every day for 20 years? What kind of reaction will they have when they see the ground shifting beneath them.
- mike_hearn 5d ago
  They won't. Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous. https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsolete-salaries-up-to-571k-demand-growing/ https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole... Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.
HEmanZ 5d ago
The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops. The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai. Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.
- dmantis 5d ago
  If there is no jobs, there is no modern economy in today's sense and "money" costs nothing. That will trigger very interesting consequences.
  - HEmanZ 5d ago
    Why would no jobs mean no money?
    - dmantis 4d ago
      We use money to exchange resources (actual or promised) in form of credit to each other. If most of the population doesn't participate in the exchange, money is worthless. You can make numbers, but those are meaningless without the underlying exchange. It's effectively a disruption of a modern society.
      - HEmanZ 4d ago
        Why would no one have underlying resources if there were very few jobs? There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things
        dmantis 4d ago
        There is no way of redistributing those resources but violence if there is no economy. Say, you have 98 people who have literally nothing and no established way to obtain basic needs, and 2 people who has something based on whatever. Say, these 2 people can close their needs by asking a magic machine to do something for them, or even exchange some goods between each other, but there is no economic sense to hire anybody. Those 98 left aren't going to sit and die, watching.
encyclopedism 5d ago
The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding whilst at the same it providing value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful. For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
- deterministic 5d ago
  Humans still compete playing chess, sprinting etc. even though machines are vastly superior to humans. Real artists can’t not do art. They do it for the pleasure of doing it. Not to compete with other humans or machines. And there will be artists who will use AI to create mind blowing new types of art that would have been impossible before. I can’t wait to see how humans will use this powerful new tool for creativity.
  - encyclopedism 4d ago
    Your point is a tautology. The actual point being made is about changing circumstances affecting large swathes of society which may mean an increased possibility of worsening circumstances for said humans. Not that it will mean humans are no longer able to do programming.
newdee 4d ago
> and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. And now the ladder is effectively pulled up behind those pre-AI engineers. What does the pipeline for newcomers look like? How do those who come after achieve that same level of depth and understanding in a world where AI permeates everything?
- simonw 4d ago
  I'm seeing mixed signals on this one. On the one hand you get stories like Shopify and Cloudflare expanding their intern programs because interns can get so much more done now. On the other hand there seems to be a measurable slowdown in hiring of juniors at many companies, since seniors can cover the ground that used to be farmed out to the juniors. My hope is that LLM assistance will help motivated newcomers accelerate the rate at which they learn the craft, similar to how my rate of improvement as a senior has been accelerated.
xingped 4d ago
> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill any more, you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left, and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. People keep saying this, but I'm really not seeing it to be true. At least not in any employable capacity. All anyone seems to want now is an AI babysitter that can poke and prod it to puke out as much code as possible. There is no desire left for human competency, ingenuity, or creativity in this space. You could claim the same about art, but you see time and again and again that businesses, big and small, would rather shit out AI art for any of their art needs rather than hire an artist. And that's way more visible and obvious. I'm honestly starting to think these AI glazing "everything is actually totally fine, guys" comments are an astroturfing campaign.

by simonw 5d ago

sonicrocketman 5d ago

I feel the same and have gone through a similar journey.

testaccount121 5d ago

Simon, you stole from me a fulfilling career of hand crafting pelican svgs.

slowin 5d ago

> The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. I think it depends on the person. I've been waiting for AI since I first saw Wargames as a child. As soon as I saw that agents could code at or beyond my level, it felt like the entire world was unlocked. Now I can explore so many ideas that I was bottle-necked on with my own time to write the code before. I would consider myself a technologist and it's a very exciting time to explore what technology can do. I loved writing code, but mostly because creating something that tapped the power of tech was my goal. Now I can achieve that goal 100x and it feels like a superpower.

qarl 5d ago
> it feels like a superpower I say "it feels like flying." People worry that I'm too enthusiastic about AI. My obvious answer is - wouldn't you love to fly too?
- notpachet 5d ago
  There's a mythological story about the hubris of flying; I'm sure Claude can pull it up for you.
  - qarl 5d ago
    HA! Yes, too true.
- bornfreddy 5d ago
  I already did, before AI: import antigravity
cortesoft 5d ago
This is exactly how I feel, and I have been trying to think how to articulate it. I love programming, and have loved it ever since I read the first page of my BASIC programming book 35 years ago and learned how to write a PRINT statement. I remember running into my parent's room as an 8 year old, telling them I knew how to make the computer print something. It was so exciting. I have never lost that excitement, but my love is not just about programming. It is about technology in general. I love the idea of having smart machines, and being able to use them to do stuff, and the power you can have when you automate something. I love being able to come up with an idea about how a machine can do what I want, and then how that means it can do it over and over without tiring. I loved technology in science fiction. My family watched Star Trek: The Next Generation from the first episode until the last. I loved Data, I loved the ships computer, I loved the holodeck. I dreamed about having those. I was so excited when I spent way too much money to buy the very first Oculus Rift dev kit, because it felt so much closer to the holodeck than anything I had experienced before. I have felt that way about AI. I was astonished by the first ChatGPT I used. It was amazing! The first programming AI I tried was github's copilot, and I was already astonished. It was able to complete the function I needed! How did it know what I wanted to do? I continue to be amazed at every advancement. I remember the first time I tried Claude, and I had it write me a connect 4 engine in Rust (writing connect 4 engines is one of my standard 'new language' routines), and it did it! I have felt closer to living in Star Trek these last couple of years than ever before. Telling the computer what you want, seeing the response, and refining what you are asking for is how I dreamed of using a computer since I saw them do that on the Enterprise. And here I am, doing it! I like computers and programming because I like technology, and I like seeing it advance into areas that seemed impossible before. I love the fact that the 'Tasks' XKCD that I loved to quote for so many years when non-programmers would talk about a programming idea (https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/) has become completely obsolete; now anyone could spin up a bird identifying app in a few hours. What was 'virtually impossible' is now routine. THAT is the thing I love, not writing code. I mean, I DO love writing code, but I love getting my machines to do what I want even more. I can't wait until robotics become more mainstream. I can't wait to have a machine that can clean my bathrooms and do my laundry and cooke me dinner. I can already imagine the routines I will develop, and the new ways of combining those skills I will come up with when these things are invented. Or hell, maybe I will join one of the companies working on those things and move that field forward. There is no end to what technology can do, and I am so excited to see what is next.

erqtw1 5d ago

The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability. There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! This is defeatist propaganda.

hax0ron3 5d ago
The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.
simonw 5d ago
> given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance. My comment here is meant to be the opposite of defeatist propaganda! I'm arguing that those of us with skills and experience are becoming more, not less valuable.
- 1234-asdv 5d ago
  It is strange then that those with skills and experience apparently refrain from building websites, since all AI websites are worse than any non-SEO website before 2023. There isn't a single one that is good, and one that was built by a web framework developer whom I shall not name uses 100% CPU for a static website. The point of this is that AI is unnecessary and makes products worse even with experienced people operating the AI.

willchis 5d ago

This is where I'm at mentally... but also it was quite nice for an army of us to get paid six figure salaries to chug along creating React components and sitting in 3 hour retrospectives ;) The ladder has certainly been raised.

sidrag22 5d ago
To me it just fills like a bit more of a demand to be a generalist, or be really good at pairing with other specialists.

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bitexploder 5d ago

Someone was probably sad when they saw a compiler work for the first time after years of writing assembly. AI is intellectually different, progressing, and has no visible horizon, but in my life technology never did in computing. The point is that technology changes often. I think having a couple of decades in tech makes the shock easier to absorb in many ways. And also harder regarding something so familiar becoming so rapidly irrelevant. But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.

Sivart13 5d ago

> a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread. It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.

gh0stcat 5d ago

I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of those who are writing code daily.

cmrdporcupine 5d ago
What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through, and it was frankly amazing that we lasted this long without getting hit with it. The consequences aren't great, no. However it was always inevitable because of the way our economy runs. So the finger should not be pointed at AI, but instead the forces that will harness it in certain ways. That might be impossible to tackle at an individual level, and might feel futile... but so is blaming AI.
- brazukadev 5d ago
  > What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through Many of those trades still exist and some got even in higher demand, they just use software.
simonw 5d ago
> Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? The rate at which I'm learning has gone up. I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work. I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrating to work that way now. As a result I'm out of practice at it. I expect if someone waved a magic wand and eliminated all forms of LLM and coding agents from the world I would have a couple of less productive months spinning back up on my hand-crafted coding skills again.

notpachet 5d ago

There's a larger existential crisis still in store for you. Our global civilization is collapsing. We are choking to death on the unchecked negative externalities of our own progress. It is our species' Achilles heel. Whether or not an individual developer adapts to this temporary capability blip (agentic coding) will not matter in the long run. The systems necessary for supporting these capabilities are too brittle to survive the century.

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willchis 5d ago
I keep mentioning to people that last winter parts of the arctic were 10C hotter than the average for the last 100 years and I get blank looks.
- mike_hearn 5d ago
  Where did you get that from? This must be relying on picking very specific parts of the Arctic. This year has not been unusual for the Arctic, in fact, it was colder than the normally cited average (1958-2002). Take a look, see for yourself: https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!) Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back. https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter... Greenland mass balance was entirely average and is currently at the top end of the known observations, it seems: https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
  - willchis 5d ago
    Go to your first link, click on 2025 and look at the winter values (Nov/Dec).

palmotea 5d ago

> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. Two important things you didn't address: 1. Quality-of-life 2. Economic security I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic security (in a way that increases inequality) and make my work simultaneously more intense and less satisfying. I may be in a better position than a new-grad comp sci major, but the effects are a net negative. That doesn't make me happy or excited. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'm also unhappy for the new-grad comp sci majors, too. I think one thing you can say for sure, is AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way, despite any propaganda to the contrary. It's deeply anti-human, and serves other inhuman mechanisms first and foremost. A relatively small number of people are building it to just see what happens and maybe win the lottery in the process, and everyone else has to deal with the consequences of that (which, by the way, is why data centers are so hated: it's not the first we've been through something like this and almost everyone is sick of it).

chasd00 5d ago
> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
- palmotea 5d ago
  What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it. AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that. Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.

discreteevent 5d ago

> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477

simonw 5d ago
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it. That particular reference isn't fair though. You need to view that comment in context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944 The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time. Just today, Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) tweeted that "Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human": https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577 https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577 I'm entirely in agreement with that. The interesting challenge is how we achieve that new high bar.
- mwcampbell 4d ago
  I don't actually buy that tweet from Boris Cherny. When the Claude Code source leaked some months ago, there were many posts on Mastodon about how the revealed code was a shit show, a big pile of hacks. I wish now that I had bookmarked some of those posts.
  - simonw 4d ago
    Here's the one I saw most widely cited: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 I wasn't very impressed by that pile-on, personally. Has there ever been a rapidly evolving 1,000,000+ line codebase that suitably motivated critics couldn't pick a thousand holes in and conclude that the code was garbage? Claude Code is used by millions of people on a daily basis, has generated billions of dollars in revenue, and spits out new features on a weekly basis. Many of the complaints I saw - things like the absurdity of asking for JSON and then looping against a schema until it matches - are common patterns for building software against language models, which are weird components to need to tame.

xnx 5d ago

> set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left Definitely true at this exact moment, but very uncertain that AI won't also outrun those other areas faster than even existing experts.

simonw 5d ago
You need expertise to productively use that AI. Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless. Now imagine someone with no existing web knowledge trying to get Claude to build them a Progressive Web App with offline capabilities that uses SQLite compiled to WASM. Moon language.
- xnx 5d ago
  > You need expertise to productively use that AI. Certainly true now, but might not be in 2 years. Similar to how a person can hire a lawyer or a carpenter without knowing anything about those fields. Knowing what you want (even expressed imprecisely) might be all that is needed.

Verdex 5d ago

> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)

hintymad 5d ago

Maybe the real threat is that our industry has been stalled for years, or to put it more politely, that it has been mature for a while. Back before 2010 or so, people actually read books like The Art of Computer Programming, the Dragon Book on compilers, and the Lions’ Book on Unix, or followed sites like lambda-the-ultimate.org. Then sites like High Scalability became popular. Not that everyone studied them cover to cover, but plenty of engineers considered them essential reading. Yet long before LLMs came along, that kind of depth had clearly become niche. The creator of High Scalability even put the site up for sale. Whenever someone posts an article titled "Top X Data Structures for Y," every single structure mentioned was invented decades ago. If most of what we do now is just slice and dice abstractions created and refined by previous generations, we are really just relying on our once-unique ability to transfer knowledge - something AI is rapidly replacing. This isn't unique to software engineering. In Renaissance Italy, mathematicians like Tartaglia and Fior hoarded cubic formula shortcuts like proprietary algorithms and challenged rivals to public math duels. Today, we solve cubic equations without a second thought. Special functions used to be a staple college course for physics and engineering majors. Are they still? The US military used to employ thousands of people just to calculate PDEs by hand. Do we need anyone doing that today? Our only hope is that our society moves fast enough to create new demands and problem domains that genuinely require new systems and algorithms. Look at AI: it’s evolving rapidly, driving massive demand, and forcing the development of new systems and architectures. As a result, the lucky few[1] working at that frontier are having rewarding careers. Without frontiers like that, the rest of us risk becoming irrelevant. [1] One unfortunate factor is that building AI now requires lots of capital for accessing GPUs, which means individuals in the open source community have a hard time working on it.

ericmcer 5d ago

I am wondering how this will effect other industries more. We are pretty flexible as software engineers because our skillset needs to constantly evolve. For a lawyer or radiologist or anyone who has been able to do the same thing every day for 20 years? What kind of reaction will they have when they see the ground shifting beneath them.

mike_hearn 5d ago
They won't. Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous. https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsolete-salaries-up-to-571k-demand-growing/ https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole... Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.

HEmanZ 5d ago

The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops. The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai. Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.

dmantis 5d ago
If there is no jobs, there is no modern economy in today's sense and "money" costs nothing. That will trigger very interesting consequences.
- HEmanZ 5d ago
  Why would no jobs mean no money?
  - dmantis 4d ago
    We use money to exchange resources (actual or promised) in form of credit to each other. If most of the population doesn't participate in the exchange, money is worthless. You can make numbers, but those are meaningless without the underlying exchange. It's effectively a disruption of a modern society.
    - HEmanZ 4d ago
      Why would no one have underlying resources if there were very few jobs? There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things
      - dmantis 4d ago
        There is no way of redistributing those resources but violence if there is no economy. Say, you have 98 people who have literally nothing and no established way to obtain basic needs, and 2 people who has something based on whatever. Say, these 2 people can close their needs by asking a magic machine to do something for them, or even exchange some goods between each other, but there is no economic sense to hire anybody. Those 98 left aren't going to sit and die, watching.

encyclopedism 5d ago

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding whilst at the same it providing value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful. For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

deterministic 5d ago
Humans still compete playing chess, sprinting etc. even though machines are vastly superior to humans. Real artists can’t not do art. They do it for the pleasure of doing it. Not to compete with other humans or machines. And there will be artists who will use AI to create mind blowing new types of art that would have been impossible before. I can’t wait to see how humans will use this powerful new tool for creativity.
- encyclopedism 4d ago
  Your point is a tautology. The actual point being made is about changing circumstances affecting large swathes of society which may mean an increased possibility of worsening circumstances for said humans. Not that it will mean humans are no longer able to do programming.

newdee 4d ago

> and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. And now the ladder is effectively pulled up behind those pre-AI engineers. What does the pipeline for newcomers look like? How do those who come after achieve that same level of depth and understanding in a world where AI permeates everything?

simonw 4d ago
I'm seeing mixed signals on this one. On the one hand you get stories like Shopify and Cloudflare expanding their intern programs because interns can get so much more done now. On the other hand there seems to be a measurable slowdown in hiring of juniors at many companies, since seniors can cover the ground that used to be farmed out to the juniors. My hope is that LLM assistance will help motivated newcomers accelerate the rate at which they learn the craft, similar to how my rate of improvement as a senior has been accelerated.

xingped 4d ago

> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill any more, you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left, and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. People keep saying this, but I'm really not seeing it to be true. At least not in any employable capacity. All anyone seems to want now is an AI babysitter that can poke and prod it to puke out as much code as possible. There is no desire left for human competency, ingenuity, or creativity in this space. You could claim the same about art, but you see time and again and again that businesses, big and small, would rather shit out AI art for any of their art needs rather than hire an artist. And that's way more visible and obvious. I'm honestly starting to think these AI glazing "everything is actually totally fine, guys" comments are an astroturfing campaign.