YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Yes. There is also reason to believe that the ecosystem is on the path to migrating to one where human developers are an afterthought at best. In the current phase we have lots of more stuff in markdown and other human readable formats and programming languages for sure but there’s little reason to believe that they will stay that way as humans get further from the code in general and the primary consumers and producers are AI. It would be strange if it remains optimized for English-speaking humans for very long.

Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.

It's almost as if this problem was forseeable.

Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.

If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?

I remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.

Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.

And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.

0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.

> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.

People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.

https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...

I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.

Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.

Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.

> HN is 70% AI propagandists

really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.

I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?

In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.

Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?

Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.

If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"

I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.

They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??

> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.

If you had to larp as an anti AI person just to say the stupidest thing possible, this is what you would say.

Writing code was the "downtime" for me, it existed between boughts of intense problem solving. With AI agents my time is shifting heavily towards solving problems and I have less downtime as a result.

I worry about burnout.

I am surprised how many people like the actual writing part, it always felt to me like doing micro in an RTS game. I know a lot of people love that too but I always played RTS games to feel like a general. But I'm still in the camp of reading every single change the LLM does, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds, but maybe that will end up being a waste of time soon. Like if the job ends up being just writing and reviewing MD files for the agent to digest I'll hate it too.

Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?

How strange.

Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.

At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.

Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)

My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.

Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.

Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.

What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.

Are you forced to use AI by your company? If so why?

> it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

Who is forcing you to use AI?

Yes, because you were silently fired as a developer and rehired as an AI manager. You can't compare apples and oranges.

It really depends, it seems. Through my coding career I always had interesting, and maybe a bit too big ideas for consumer software, bogged down by the fact that I like to code interesting algorithms but not business processes and interfaces. And in that sense AI is really a miracle for me - I no longer need to get bogged down by tedious work, I can focus on architecting the software and interesting algos (nothing seem too big nowadays) and have AI code it, debug it, and deploy it in a fraction of time it would take me if I had to code it entirely! Also, I no longer need to learn all these modern frameworks that keep spurring like mushrooms. In fact, frameworks are not a necessity when AI can vanilla JS everything anyway.

It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)

> I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.

Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.

It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.

The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.

I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.

[delayed]

At that point it’s probably worth taking a more mainstream hobby like music or dancing, you’ll have a much bigger community of passionate folks. I suspect that will happen to programmers as a hobby folks too, they might discover they like playing music instruments instead.

Not to mention your friends still enjoy receiving custom made knitted stuff as presents, or your neighbors if you see someone struggling. Or donate it somewhere, or put it in a display shelf to be reminded what you can actually do. Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)

It's just tough to hear a mainstream "impactful" line of work be compared to knitting and sewing. Say what you want but people thought that their work was necessary to the advancement of society, or at least something bigger than themselves. Whether you agree with them or not, reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.

I don’t deny that there’s more slop than ever, but I would argue that this is a quantitative issue not a qualitative one, because frankly, the Internet has been drowned in slop for over a decade now. Those creative industries have had to deal with a lot of low quality content (some bot-generated even before LLMs!) for a while now.

So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.

I disagree, understanding systems and problem solving, understand technical capabilities, requirements and delivering a product is what always paid for by consumers. Paying programming labor was just a means to an end, removing that expensive and time consuming part creates a world with so many more possibilities.

A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.

Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.

It's a great future.

This is exactly my problem.

I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.

It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.

Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?

It's really not like that. Sorry to disappoint you but it's more like cars were invented, and someone says "have you tried the Ford Model T, it's much better than a steam carriage".

Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".

I'm a little in the middle, I was always really good at programming, it just clicked for me. As a physicist, I could see that I was OK at the math and physics but excelled at the programming piece. At the same time, I never really cared much about the art of programming itself. It still was a means to an end. I know that does make it so I can't totally empathize with engineers who just love the art of programming and the existential fear they might be feeling with the looming AI takeover.