I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine. I understood that machine completely. Every byte of RAM had a purpose I could trace. Every pixel on screen was there because I’d put it there. The path from intention to result was direct, visible, and mine.
Forty-two years later, I’m sitting in front of hardware that would have seemed like science fiction to that kid, and I’m trying to figure out what “building things” even means anymore.
This isn’t a rant about AI. It’s not a “back in my day” piece. It’s something I’ve been circling for months, and I think a lot of experienced developers are circling it too, even if they haven’t said it out loud yet.
The era that made me
My favourite period of computing runs from the 8-bits through to about the 486DX2-66. Every machine in that era had character. The Sinclair Spectrum with its attribute clash. The Commodore 64 with its SID chip doing things the designers never intended. The NES with its 8-sprite-per-scanline limit that made developers invent flickering tricks to cheat the hardware. And the PC — starting life as a boring beige box for spreadsheets, then evolving at breakneck pace through the 286, 386, and 486 until it became a gaming powerhouse that could run Doom. You could feel each generation leap. Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative.
These weren’t just products. They were engineering adventures with visible tradeoffs. You had to understand the machine to use it. IRQ conflicts, DMA channels, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT optimisation, memory managers — getting a game to run was the game. You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity.
And the software side matched. Small teams like id Software were going their own way, making bold technical decisions because nobody had written the rules yet. Carmack’s raycasting in Wolfenstein, the VGA Mode X tricks in Doom — these were people pushing against real constraints and producing something genuinely new. Creative constraints bred creativity.
Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible.
But it wasn’t just the craft that changed. The promise changed.
When I started, there was a genuine optimism about what computers could be. A kid with a Spectrum could teach themselves to build anything. The early web felt like the greatest levelling force in human history. Small teams made bold decisions because nobody had written the rules yet.
That hope gave way to something I find genuinely distasteful. The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks.
The thing I loved changed, and then it was put to work doing things I’m not proud to be associated with. That’s a different kind of loss than just “the tools moved on.”
But I adapted. That’s what experienced developers, human beings, do.
The shifts I rode
Over four decades I’ve been through more technology transitions than I can count. New languages, new platforms, new paradigms. CLI to GUI. Desktop to web. Web to mobile. Monoliths to microservices. Tapes, floppy discs, hard drives, SSDs. JavaScript frameworks arriving and dying like mayflies.
Each wave required learning new things, but the core skill transferred. You learned the new platform, you applied your existing understanding of how systems work, and you kept building. The tool changed; the craft didn’t. You were still the person who understood why things broke, how systems composed, where today’s shortcut became next month’s mess.
I’ve written production code in more languages than some developers have heard of. I’ve shipped software on platforms that no longer exist. I’ve chased C-beams off the shoulder of Orion. And every time the industry lurched in a new direction, the experience compounded. You didn’t start over. You brought everything with you and applied it somewhere new.
That’s the deal experienced developers made with the industry: things change, but understanding endures.
This time is different
I say that knowing how often those words have been wrong throughout history. But hear me out.
Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this.
I noticed it gradually. I’d be working on something — building a feature, designing an architecture — and I’d realise I was still doing the same thing I’d always done, just with the interesting bits hollowed out. The part where you figure out the elegant solution, where you wrestle with the constraints, where you feel the satisfaction of something clicking into place — that was increasingly being handled by a model that doesn’t care about elegance and has never felt satisfaction.
Cheaper. Faster. But hollowed out.
I’m not typing the code anymore. I’m reviewing it, directing it, correcting it. And I’m good at that — 42 years of accumulated judgment about what works and what doesn’t, what’s elegant versus what’s expedient, how systems compose and where they fracture. That’s valuable. I know it’s valuable. But it’s a different kind of work, and it doesn’t feel the same.
The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing that kept me up at night for decades — the puzzle, the chase, the moment where you finally understand why something isn’t working — that’s been compressed into a prompt and a response. And I’m watching people with a fraction of my experience produce superficially similar output. The craft distinction is real, but it’s harder to see from the outside. Harder to value. Maybe harder to feel internally.
The abstraction tower
Here’s the part that makes me laugh, darkly.
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack. AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain.
The difference is: I remember what it felt like to understand the whole machine. I’ve had that experience. And losing it — even acknowledging that it was lost long before AI arrived — is a kind of grief that someone who never had it can’t fully feel.
What remains
I don’t want to be dishonest about this. There’s a version of this post where I tell you that experience is more valuable than ever, that systems thinking and architectural judgment are the things AI can’t replace, that the craft endures in a different form.
And that’s true. When I’m working on something complex — juggling system-level dependencies, holding a mental model across multiple interacting specifications, making the thousand small decisions that determine whether something feels coherent or just works — I can see how I still bring something AI doesn’t. The taste. The judgment. The pattern recognition from decades of seeing things go wrong.
AI tools actually make that kind of thinking more valuable, not less. When code generation is cheap, the bottleneck shifts to the person who knows what to ask for, can spot when the output is subtly wrong, and can hold the whole picture together. Typing was never the hard part.
But I’d be lying if I said it felt the same. It doesn’t. The wonder is harder to access. The sense of discovery, of figuring something out through sheer persistence and ingenuity — that’s been compressed. Not eliminated, but compressed. And something is lost in the compression, even if something is gained.
The fallow period
I turned 50 recently. Four decades of intensity, of crafting and finding satisfaction and identity in the building.
And now I’m in what I’ve started calling a fallow period. Not burnout exactly. More like the ground shifting under a building you thought that although ever changing also had a permanence, and trying to figure out where the new foundation is.
I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling.
The feeling is: I gave 42 years to this thing, and the thing changed into something I’m not sure I recognise anymore. Not worse, necessarily. Just different. And different in a way that challenges the identity I built around it and doesn’t satisfy in the way it did.
I suspect a lot of developers over 40 are feeling something similar and not saying it, because the industry worships youth and adaptability and saying “this doesn’t feel like it used to” sounds like you’re falling behind.
I’m not falling behind. I’m moving ahead, taking advantage of the new tools, building faster than ever, and using these tools to help others accelerate their own work. I’m creating products I could only have dreamt of a few years ago. But at the same time I’m looking at the landscape, trying to figure out what building means to me now. The world’s still figuring out its shape too. Maybe that’s okay.
Maybe the fallow period is the point. Not something to push through, but something to be in for a while.
I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
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I'm 61 (retired when I was 57).
I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area.
Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on.
I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives.
Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.)
You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)
But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress.
"What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.
I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house.
Yee haw!
you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count
while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.
Its crazy how management has gone from productivity to a kind of policing, crowd control and abstract number management that has no sense.
One of things that's being discussed now is AI won't really help people ship products faster, because no one was serious about building them at the first place. In most large corps the managerial layers simply care about preserving their own jobs and comp.
Also similar things an be said about Product management too. Only a few months they would says developers are busy with other things, now that we can ship quite fast, whats your world changing idea? None
By bestthrowaway 2026-02-115:45 I like my manager but I think what many people don't seem to understand is that the manager tends to be the bottleneck. We were moving as fast as he was able to give requirements even without AI, and now we're being told to use as much AI as makes sense and now we just more product roadblocks faster. We may be shipping faster but amortized over all the roadblocks I'd say our velocity is like 10% faster.
Code was never the bottleneck.
Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so.
If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.
By tom_m 2026-02-1115:19 Because if that's what they were told to do. The organization is likely very dysfunctional, or has messed up priorities, which is probably about 80%+ of the startups out there and companies in tech in general.
Seriously. There's not many healthy engineering organizations out there. So if you fire one manager you end up with either another bad one or one who performs poorly due to the organization.
Paramount here is culture. It's important to remove toxicity. I remove toxic managers (and team members) because even if they were smart or productive, they ultimately drag down the entire org and the net of it is negative productivity. I don't care if they were the most skilled programmer on the team. Doesn't matter. They could be unproductive or could be making others unproductive and unhappy. They're out. They're out before they burn or push someone else out.
So you may also find that is the reason. If the manager is generally a positive influence on morale or culture, but is perhaps just a little too reckless, they may still have value. Remember that the reckless pressure may even being coming from top down. A lot of people still subscribe to (and misunderstood) the whole "move fast and break things" mantra.
By MathMonkeyMan 2026-02-116:031 reply It depends, of course, but in my experience managers like this do get fired after a few years, followed shortly after or before by their manager.
Years! I can see why managerial positions can be so coveted. You can be shitty at your job for years before getting sacked.
By tom_m 2026-02-1115:27 It's easy to hide in those positions. Many people don't know how to measure performance there and they get to point fingers.
My advice to anyone in this boat is to talk to the team underneath them every now and then. Get a pulse check. See where they get stuck and then set the managers goals based on that. At least one of their goals. It can be a small thing. It need not derail any roadmap or anything else. Explain why it's important for their team, explain where the team is having trouble.
See if they do it. If they do, they care about their team. If it's a small task/goal, it proves they can also be productive. Often times we have people taking on enormous goals that are vague or difficult to measure or complete in a timely manner. So a little mini goal (or a few, test a few over time) is very important here. Now, if they can't meet this goal or are unwilling to - you know you have a manager that doesn't care about the team they are managing. They can't manage that team or they can't be at the org. You can of course always try a different team or role for them.
In my experience a lot of managers (especially middle managers) kinda like to sit up there in a tower shouting orders at people, but never want to get their hands dirty or never want to support their team. They sometimes don't even realize the orders they are shouting are incorrect or impossible tasks to complete. This is where you get the "you now need 95% test coverage." That very often doesn't come from a C-suite level or customer demand because they don't care what the % is, they just want it to work.
By aryehof 2026-02-118:23 Because the managers of those managers don't know the difference.
typical management layer in big tech
manager < senior engineering manager < director of engineering < vp of engineering < cto
why are so many layers needed ?
it incentivizes busy work and shit metrics like I outlined above. if they fire the manager it also means their managers have to get fired too
it's like communist party bureaucracy just veiled with tech
By chasd00 2026-02-1116:29 cto is a very wide title and in a global enterprise with hundreds of thousands of employees it's impossible to have a flat organization. There's probably 15 vp of engineering reporting to the cto. Each vp is going to have 10-20 directors reporting to them and beneath directors the fanout gets even wider. It does incentivize busy work and in a large org you can hide in the corner and be a potted plant for your whole career if you're smart enough to find it. But that is the nature of a large cooperation, I can't remember who said it but something like 80% of impact and progress to keep a business going is made by 20% of employees whether it's a big company or not. The rest are just sort of there playing along.
By tom_m 2026-02-1115:33 Depends on size of org. Many orgs end up too top heavy too quickly and don't have things in place to support that. That's where you get the "busy work." It's because they have too much time on their hands.
By tom_m 2026-02-1115:04 Hey, I'm now measuring PR open time ... Only because there's been open PRs for months. It is of course possible that broad directional metrics are useful.
By hippo22 2026-02-1022:59 I don’t have anything to add other than to say this was beautifully written.
By wsc981 2026-02-116:40 At least AI seems very useful to quickly write unit tests for the stuff I work with these days, like Angular & C#.
P.S.: I loved Glider and Glypha, great games!
Thanks for sharing! I definitely agree. I've seen web software go downhill somewhere after 2013. It's been sad and now we have far more buggy apps and security issues on the Internet than ever before.
I used to love the 90s because it was "for nerds." The space wasn't crowded and you could actually do good work and research. So much research went into things and I feel like that died somewhere. Or is dying. You get a few good things coming out here and there, but it's masked by this "I want to be a celebrity" stuff that's going on. It started with conferences and such and has now progressed to YouTube and live streaming. That's kinda sickening to me honestly. What we have is pull in directions from the loudest voices in the room despite the fact this pull could be directly into flames.
As people try to sift through the confusion and overcrowding they tend to grab on to anything they can for refuge. Ironically they are often unaware of the dangerous situation they put themselves in.
I think cowboy coding may see a definition change.
By chasd00 2026-02-1116:37 people twisting and manipulating llms to do all sorts of unintended things reminds me of the late 90s early 2000s when everyone was twisting and manipulating html, webservers, and browsers to do all sorts of unintended things. It kind of has that feel to me, where it's something new and no one knows where it's going but i seeing a lot of "hey check this out, i put this together last night and it's kind of cool" again.
I’ve never been asked for coverage as a metric or target, at least not by managers. Most of the… drudge that you describe seems to come from fellow developers. These are self-inflicted wounds by the “journeyman idealists”, making us all perpetual beginners.
(That said, I do like unit tests and I think code reviews can be useful for sparing if you have a good vibe and trust in the team.)
I have seen coworkers, who are otherwise very nice people, become rather nasty when given some authority over other's code in the form of code reviews. The code review turns into "this is how I would have written it, rewrite it."
What we did before code reviews: we would get together with our fellow engineers in front of a whiteboard and knock out the structure of the code one was tasked with. We'd argue whether caching is necessary or if the framework provides it for us. We'd talk about concurrency issues and whether to use semaphores or locks…
Once the plan looked good, an engineer was trusted enough to go off and implement it.
Unit tests are fine. Before unit tests we had coworkers (QA) that did full test suites for integration, functional testing. At the more "unit level", robust param checking (with assertions, logging) happened early within the functions that could fail. (Obvious example: checking for zero in a function that might use that value to divide. Its a kind of unit test in situ.)
Of course when management uses unit tests as some kind of replacement for actual integration and functional testing they become an end unto themselves (bonus: the company is also able to lay off QA).
By port11 2026-02-1120:16 I understand. It’s a great reply.
To my dismay, I’ve never worked in a place like the first one you’ve described. Managers have certainly been confident enough in me to just let me ship stuff I built alone, or obviously that a team built without the usual red tape. Your model is very intriguing, I’ll try to implement something similar if I’m ever again able.
It’s true that code reviewers can become feral and the smallest detail a source of contention. I’ve had otherwise good team leads completely rewrite my code after accepting a review. It’s okay, maybe it wasn’t that good. Egos hurt and get hurt.
About QA: well, companies — I hope — eventually pay the price. Apple’s image of software quality now contrasted with a company that lost the trust of power users. QA and unit tests are complementary. If anything, it’s acceptance and integration tests that hurt QA, but I’ve never seen these 2 done properly anywhere.
By bitwize 2026-02-119:11 > But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
That is why y'all needed the God-Emperor of Marketing to come in and rescue you from bankruptcy and put you on track to becoming a trillion-dollar company.
I'm a millennial, but I share some feelings. I also think modern programming careers often feel like factory jobs where most of the time you must be compliant with some BS. You often find the true joy only in personal projects.
By konart 2026-02-116:12 Modern programming careers _are_ factory jobs.
Until you have some sort of senior+ position you are literally just standing in front of a conveyor line.
My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.
The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.
I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
By bigstrat2003 2026-02-1016:2318 reply > If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
By lelanthran 2026-02-1019:576 reply > For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
It's very sad, for me.
Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.
If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games.
I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs.
It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them.
I don't see a solution here.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1020:332 reply My job for the last 8 years has involved
Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.
Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.
While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.
Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.
Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!).
Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit.
It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!
By danparsonson 2026-02-117:11 > Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.
You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.
The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.
I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
By tarsinge 2026-02-1121:16 > It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?
I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-112:19 Well as depressing as it is, check out the 2024 and 2025 YC batches. Guess how many of them are “ai” something or other? It’s never been about “hackers”. Not a single founder who takes VC funding is thinking about a sustainable business - at least their investors aren’t - they are hoping for the “exit”.
It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.
By lelanthran 2026-02-1020:371 reply > Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
You are not the first person to say things like this.
Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1021:232 reply If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.
On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.
You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.
Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't really have much ground to complain
By bestthrowaway 2026-02-116:01 I play video games for fun. I also enjoy automation games where the point is to get the game to play itself. I like achievements, but I won't "cheat" to get them.
My company pays me to build software that helps make them money. They don't care how I write that software as long as I do it fast and correctly. If that's by hand, I'll do it by hand. If vibe coding can get the job done, then I'll do that.
"Vibe coding" isn't just writing specs. It's ensuring that the vibe coding process doesn't introduce regressions, new bugs, etc. My boss writes specs for me, which, if I were to naively plop them into cursor or Claude code, would generate stuff that kinda works but not in a way that could be considered production ready. I plan, adjust the plan, generate, regenerate, refine. Could it be done faster by hand? Maybe. But it's the tool I've chosen for the job and the bosses are happy with it.
By HoldOnAMinute 2026-02-1021:122 reply I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context
By lelanthran 2026-02-1021:152 reply > I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context
Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc.
They know everything, except how to program.
> They know everything, except how to program
In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program.
I was a BA forever ago during a summer job in college. That job wasn't for me at all! Looking back on the experience, putting together a FRD felt much like writing a CLAUDE.md with some prompts thrown in!
By whtrbt 2026-02-1021:15 Business Analyst
By ern_ave 2026-02-1113:07 > letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.
I'd love to get to the point where I'm still writing code, but the LLM is typing it for me. Part of the problem though, is that I actually kind of think in code, and I often have to start typing in order to fully form an algorithm in my head.
By marcus_holmes 2026-02-112:161 reply I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing.
Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much.
I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.
^ This. People bemoan the death of coding, but easily 80%+ of the code I've written commercially was just CRUD or ETL shite. I've done a few interesting things (a formula parser, a WYSWIG survey builder for signature pads, a navigation controller for line-guided industrial vehicles, etc.) but yeah, don't miss writing reams of boilerplate. I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say!
By pydry 2026-02-1117:57 It's making it less, not more bearable.
By lelanthran 2026-02-115:571 reply > I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything.
LLMs are a multiplier. If this depressed you, then there is no way I can see the following happening.
> If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say!
What LLMs are going to do is multiply the amount of "none of your colleagues care" and "Management only does lip-service to ..."
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).
I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.
If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
> know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor
But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.
By UtopiaPunk 2026-02-1018:362 reply Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.
By rubenflamshep 2026-02-1019:021 reply As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-116:55 Software development was a race to the bottom for the majority of developers aside from the major tech companies for a decade. I’m seeing companies on the enterprise/corp dev side - where most developers work - stagnate for a decade and not keep up with inflation in tier 2 cities - again where most developers work.
By plagiarist 2026-02-112:05 That is a fiction. None of us can waste tens of thousands of dollars whipping out a C compiler or web browser on a whim to test things.
If these tools improve to the point of being able to write real code, the financial move for the agent runners is to charge far more than they are now but far less than the developers being replaced.
By clickety_clack 2026-02-1019:453 reply > it’s obviously not going to stop there.
I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.
By iso1631 2026-02-119:55 Originally spinners and weavers were quite happy. One spun, the other weaved, and the cloth was made.
Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.
The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.
But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.
Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.
Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)
Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.
This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.
By Jare 2026-02-1021:04 I think the keyword here is "some".
It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.
Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
By reactordev 2026-02-1019:551 reply Today. Ask again in 6 months. A year.
If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so
Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?
By plagiarist 2026-02-112:461 reply Society was been better without the internet. We have lost all our privacy, our third spaces, the concept of doing hobbies for fun instead of as content, and much more.
By Our_Benefactors 2026-02-1115:561 reply > Society was been better without the internet
I don't even follow the reasoning of arguing this counterpoint, you are literally only able to make this argument because the internet even exists.
By plagiarist 2026-02-1116:20 That's a "yet you participate in society" argument. It's not at all contradictory to use this communication medium to describe my perception of its negative impacts.
By marcosdumay 2026-02-1022:33 > capital is devaluing labor
I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".
Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability. Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is not the process happening here, and it's not clear what direction the valuation is going.
... even if we take for granted that any of this is really happening.
> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.
By reactordev 2026-02-1019:571 reply Reaganomics has never worked
problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)
I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.
so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
By toprerules 2026-02-1018:07 If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered in hindsight IMO.
By imtringued 2026-02-129:50 If you knew a little bit about history then you would know that the "Anti-Luddite" position is literally "shoot the unemployed if they strike".
Equivocating Luddites with backwards thinking is a way to cover up government violence. You're literally trying to misrepresent the Luddite position by implying that they had some sort of global plot to force the world to be worse and that they were rightfully stopped by the government when in reality they had some personal grievances about how they were treated and they took revenge against the owners of capital by vandalizing their capital.
You're trying to twist this into Luddites hating capital and machinery itself, which is factually wrong.
By harimau777 2026-02-1020:50 Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?
By iso1631 2026-02-119:56 For those who survived sure. For those at the time, I'm sure they would disagree
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-1017:074 reply [flagged]
By mbgerring 2026-02-1017:18 You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless, for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best of luck
By oblio 2026-02-1023:23 > The historical luddites are literally the human death drive externalized. Reject them and all of their garbage ideas with extreme prejudice.
Yes, because fighting for the rights of laborers is obviously what most people hate.
By goatlover 2026-02-1018:56 For a different perspective:
"Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-wer...
By Der_Einzige 2026-02-1019:591 reply Either you're thinking of the "room temperature semi-conductor" thing out of Korea, or you're some boomer who forgot that cold fusion was in the 80s.
I resonate with that. I also find writing code super pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with a giddy high.
What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop.
It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.
I'm in the enjoy writing code camp and do see merits of the hybrid approach, but I also worry about the (mental) costs.
I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration.
In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only now without coding sessions to clear my brain.
By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1022:551 reply I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your mental model of the code.
Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace.
LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes.
Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
By bearfox 2026-02-1118:22 It rings true. Then we have a question in front of use - when you're doing the changes yourself you are also building and adapting the mental model of the system - which approach needs less effort in total?
By kelvinjps10 2026-02-113:03 I get a dopamine hit with AI by being able to accomplish tasks fast, mostly in frontent or using a dynamic language like python because you see the changes in real time
By duskdozer 2026-02-1110:59 I'll use some small code completion but that's it. And only when I can do it locally with non-proprietary software.
Hope: I want to become a stronger dev.
Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.
By rurp 2026-02-1017:09 LLMs are similar in a lot of ways to the labor outsourcing that happened a generation or two ago. Except that instead of this development lifting a billion people out of poverty in the third world a handful of rich people will get even more rich and everyone else will have higher energy bills.
By organsnyder 2026-02-1017:01 > ...the reward of mentoring.
I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to codify it in the prompt.
And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-of-the-art of the industry.
By qingcharles 2026-02-1020:203 reply AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire career.
I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me.
I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.
Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level design/structure part of it.
THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns.
Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
By burnerToBetOut 2026-02-1112:50
Can confirm [1]> …I suspect going a more visual block > diagram route, to generate some > intermediate .md or whatever, might have > promise, especially for defining clear > bounds/separation of concerns…So can my automaton bud [2]…
_____
MODEL
…
The Verdict: If you provide a clear instruction like "Before you touch the code, read architecture.puml and ensure your changes do not violate the defined inheritance/dependency structure," the agent will be very effective at following it.
If you just "hope" it bears it in mind, it probably won't.
_The agent is a tool, not a mind-reader; it will take the shortest path to a passing test unless you wall that path off with your architectural models_.
…
To make it actually work, you need to turn the UML from a "suggestion" into a "blocker." You should add a section to your AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md ) that looks like this:
…1. Tool Trigger: By using words like "…"Why this works:
…
_____
By qingcharles 2026-02-1023:34 Definitely go for that middle step. If it's something bigger I get them to draw out a multi-phase plan, then I go through and refine that .md and have them work from that.
By hex4def6 2026-02-110:06 Same.
I've been exploring some computer vision recognition stuff. Being able to reason through my ideas with an LLM, and make visualizations like t-SNE to show how far apart a coke can and a bag of cheetos are in feature-space has been mind blowing. ("How much of a difference does tint make for recognition? Implement a slider that can show that can regenerate the 512-D features array and replot the chart")
It's helping me get an intuitive understanding 10x faster than I could reading a textbook.
By pjmlp 2026-02-117:48 Thing with factories, is that only like 25% of the original employees are left to take care of the belt, and remaining actions not covered by the robots.
Everyone is hoping to be part of those 25%.
By QuercusMax 2026-02-1018:15 I like writing new, interesting code, but learning framework #400 with all its own idiosyncrasies has gotten really old.
I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.
By brian_cunnie 2026-02-111:52 > For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it ...
This.
On my fun side project, I don't accept pull requests because writing the code is the fun part.
Only once did someone get mad at me for not accepting their pull request.
There's room for both. Give AI the boilerplate, save the exciting stuff for you.
That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.
It does NOT remain to be seen. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-s... Big players are already moving in the direction of "join us or leave us". So if you can't keep up and you aren't developing or "reinventing" something faster with the help of AI, it was nice knowing you.
By harimau777 2026-02-1020:53 These are the same employers that mandate return to office for distributed teams and micro-manage every access of our work. I think we know how its going to play out.
By blibble 2026-02-1017:01 exactly
thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now am more or less continuing to work because I want to
which will end for my employer if they insist on making me output generative excrement
By nylonstrung 2026-02-111:591 reply I think this is subjective, I personally enjoy "managing" agents more than handwriting code and dealing with syntax
At the very least, it feels ergonomic and saves me keystrokes in the same way as stuff like snippets & aliases
By abustamam 2026-02-116:39 Likewise! It's a fun puzzle to solve to figure out the right incantation to get the LLM to do what I want it to do without going off the rails.
By plastic-enjoyer 2026-02-118:04 > I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
Maybe this is the reason why I don't care that much about coding agents or have a strong opinion about them, because code was only a means to an end for me. What I enjoy is to learn about and understand systems and designing those systems, whether it's computers, operating systems or software architectures. I never did enjoy just hacking away or writing CRUD stuff.
Woodworking is still a thing despite IKEA, big box furniture stores, etc.
By cstever 2026-02-1022:08 People will pay for quality craftsmanship they can touch and enjoy and can afford and cannot do on their own - woodworking. Less so for quality code and apps because (as the Super Bowl ads showed us) anyone can create an app for their business and it's good enough. The days of high-paid coders is nearly gone. The senior and principals will hang on a little longer. Those that can adapt to business analyst mode and project manager will as well (CEOs have already told us this: adapt or get gone), but eventually even they will be outmoded because why buy a $8000 couch when I can buy one for $200 and build it myself?
By nextaccountic 2026-02-1110:15 In your own open source projects you can ban AI. A number of projects did just that. Programming doesn't need to be an activity people do just to earn money.
By carefree-bob 2026-02-113:291 reply Why do you need to delegate writing code to AI? I don't do that. Is your job mandating that you vibe code? How would they know?
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-114:451 reply They would know when you are two or three times slower producing code because you insist on having your own handcrafted, bespoke artisanal code that doesn’t meet the requirements any better than Claude could do.
By carefree-bob 2026-02-116:371 reply Two to three times faster? Has productivity doubled or tripled? Stuff shipping in 1/3 the time? I'm not aware of this - which company is now shipping features twice as fast?
AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward.
You can also use AI to write unit tests, documentation, and stuff like that, while writing the code yourself.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-117:191 reply It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers.
And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code.
Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate
My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting.
Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity.
I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time.
Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional
[1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.
By bestthrowaway 2026-02-115:47 I don't understand the problem. Nothing is stopping you from writing code.
i agree. it seem like an expectation these days to use AI sometimes... for me i am happy not using it at all, i like to be able to say "I made this" :)
I suppose the question is "Do you feel Steve Jobs made the iPhone?"
Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test - about what you feel defines 'making this'?
it's more just a personal want to be able to see what I can do on my own tbh; i don't generally judge other people on that measure
although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol
So not disagreeing as you say, it is a personal thing!
I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too.
I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have always been my output. It's just that before I had to write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the problems and the AI makes it into code.
I think that this probably the dividing line, some people enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors), some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide when looking at AI.
Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will have a very different feeling :-)
By resonious 2026-02-1022:36 Then don't delegate it to AI.
I’m not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the point I’d consider leaving the industry entirely
I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all
I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete.
When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.
YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me
However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
Having bad coworkers who write sloppy code isn't a new problem, and it's always been a social problem rather than a technical one. There was probably a lot less garbage code back when it all only ran on mainframes because fewer people having access meant that only the best would get the chance, but I still think that opening that up has been a net benefit for the craft as a whole.
Before there was some understanding that at least they wrote and understood their own garbage code
Now it is not true. Someone can spend a few minutes generating a non-sense change and push for review. I will have to spend a non-trivial amount of time to even know it’s non-sense.
This problem is already impacting projects like curl who just recently closed their bug bounty because of low-effort AI generated PRs
By jbeninger 2026-02-1021:03 Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I don't have that problem
Serious question: so what then is the value of using an LLM? Just autocomplete? So you can use natural language? I'm seriously asking. My experience has been frustrating. Had the whole thing designed, the LLM gave me diagrams and code samples, had to tell it 3 times to go ahead and write the files, had to convince it that the files didn't exist so it would actually write them. Then when I went to run it, errors ... in the build file ... the one place there should not have been errors. And it couldn't fix those.
By saghm 2026-02-116:27 The value is pretty similar to autocomplete in that sometimes it's more efficient than manually typing everything out. Sometimes the time it takes try select the right thing the complete would take longer to type manually, and you do it that way instead, and sometimes what you want isn't even going to be something you can autocomplete at all so you do it manually because of that.
Like autocomplete, it's going to work best if you already know what the end state should be and are just using it as a quicker way of getting there. If you don't already know what you're trying to complete, you might get lucky by just tabbing through to see if you find the right result, or you might spend a bunch of time only to find out that what you wanted isn't coming up for what you've typed/prompted and you're back to needing to figure out how to proceed.
By jbeninger 2026-02-1213:34 I mean, it's not actually autocomplete. But it serves the same role. I know approximately what I want to type, maybe some of the details like argument-order are a bit foggy. When I see the code I recognize it as my own and don't have too much trouble reading it.
But I use LLMs one level higher than autocomplete, at the level of an entire file. My prompts tend to look like "We need a new class to store user pets. Base it on the `person` class but remove Job and add Species. For now, Species is an enum of CAT,DOG,FISH, but we'll probably turn that into a separate table later. Validate the name is just a single word, and indicate that constraint when rendering it. Read Person.js, CODE_CONVENTIONS.md, and DATA_STRUCTURES.md before starting. When complete, read REFACTOR.md"
With the inclusion of code examples and conventions, the agent produces something pretty close to what I'd write myself, particularly when dealing with boilerplate Data or UI structures. Things that share common structure or design philosophy, but not common enough to refactor meaningfully.
I still have to read it through and understand it as if I'd written it myself, but the LLM saves a lot of typing and acts as a second pair of eyes. Codex currently is very defensive. I have to remove some unnecessary guardrails, but it will protect against rare issues I might not have noticed on my first pass.
I think there is more existential fear that is left unaddressed.
Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a while, but will they? And for how long?
$660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the models trained in these facilities be capable of?
By hinkley 2026-02-136:07 When the VC money runs out, the AI will have to get twice as good in order to make the price work out to be the same. Or they'll keep the price and enshittify the results.
For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and an AI replaces us fully.
For some of us, our jobs have already been completely disrupted by other factors (e.g., ageism) so there is nothing to lose here after 2 years and 2400+ job applications with nothing to show for it.
Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding.
If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.
By mannanj 2026-02-1117:49 Ah yes I hear that - I am hearing you share that it has felt society neglected and even discriminated actively against you. I am so sorry and can feel your pain.
One push back I have for you is to inquire about what "society" really means here for you and if its really society thats doing this for/to you or some other force or influence.
IMO it's a selective class of a few who drive things and hold exhorbant influence, the unaccountable leadership class I'll call them. It is they who fund and hold accountable the news organizations to drive their agendas, in a real-life conspiracy scenario it is actively as you say and I feel the constricting onto my own livelihood too as you say. On the other hand I don't believe ever the maxim you said of "everyone for themselves" as that's never true and never really has been. I think part of the messaging and programming of the unaccountable leadership class that they use the "news" to reinforce is this sense of powerlessness and disconnection, isolation from others. It's like we haven't been taught on how to organize and support each other and were made reliant on those systems outside us that they once let give us enough to survive. Now as they are reeling back those support systems we are back to what it always was: organizing with our communities, with strangers online and finding kindness and hope enough to organize ways of living that support us all. Not the select few.
I guess thats my way of saying even if we are defecting against each other to survive, we would do well to never forget what our greater intention and purpose is: to help each other ultimately and not these few rich actors who own the companies.
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself.
I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting.
Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.
By joquarky 2026-02-115:14 It used to be fun before companies figured out how to put claustrophobic guardrails on our autonomy.
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner.
But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper.
My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.
Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
> you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved.
Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.
By saghm 2026-02-1117:52 Responding to a blog post that was linked on an external forum with a different viewpoint isn't interrupting; it's kind of the whole point of having a comment section. They're sad, other people don't think it makes sense for them to be sad. You can respond to that disagreement with an analogy, and I can respond that I don't think the analogy makes sense. There's no obligation for people to only respond to an article with viewpoints that agree with it, and sometimes lots of people will think that the take is out of touch for some reason.
I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever.
Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it! Share your sadness with others. But don't be surprised when people who are experiencing the same thing are not sad and share their experiences.
If you want to join an AI/anti-AI echo chamber, there's plenty of places on the Internet that will gladly agree with your opinion and you can have shared joy or sadness. HN isn't that place, nor do I ever want it to become an echo-chamber.
Sure. And since the comment I originally responded to is "giving advice" to these people without taking the effort to understand their position, I feel alright reminding them that they're tone-deaf.
Doesn't mean I want an echo chamber, we're all having fun here. But those who wish to give advice should understand the position of those they're advising, otherwise they'll just embarrass themselves.
By abustamam 2026-02-116:49 There's a time and a place for certain tools.
Sometimes I like playing chess at the park with strangers or friends. Sometimes I like playing chess online with friends in another country.
Sometimes I like to play games online with my siblings. Sometimes I like to invite people over to play video games with me on the couch.
Sometimes I wanna watch a movie in the theater. Sometimes I wanna fire up Netflix and watch that same movie, but on my couch.
Sometimes I wanna vibe code an entire app in a weekend. Sometimes I wanna play code golf to solve a puzzle, where LLM usage defeats the purpose.
None of these are being replaced in my life despite having more "advanced" options. If anything, I get to enjoy things more because I have more options and ways to enjoy them.
By bonsai_spool 2026-02-110:44 >We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner.
The chess board is still there, not sure I see how LLM tools compels one to stop writing personal projects without AI assistance.
By bambax 2026-02-1017:26 Yes, absolutely. I think the companies that don't understand software, don't value software and that think that all tech is fundamentally equivalent, and who will therefore always choose the cheaper option, and fire all their good people, will eventually fail.
And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.
I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.
By joquarky 2026-02-115:18 So fire them and hire the experienced people excluded due to ageism who can't get a foot in the door anywhere because their resume shows that they went to college before the internet became commercialized.
By abustamam 2026-02-116:52 I think if companies are gonna allow engineers to vibe code they really need to provide training on how to vibe code and not produce slop.
If a company is gonna REQUIRE vibe coding as an accelerator then it is in the company's best interest to invest in education!
By OptionOfT 2026-02-1017:37 I think the issue is that given the speed the bad dev can generate sub-par results that at face value look good enough overwhelm any procedures in place.
Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.
By ex-aws-dude 2026-02-1016:50 I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than experienced developers.
By kgwxd 2026-02-1020:16 One thing I'm hoping will come out of this is the retiring of coders that always turn what should be a basic CRUD app (just about everything) into some novelty project trying to pre-solve every possible concern that could ever come up, and/or a no-code solution that will never actually get used by a non-developer and frustrate every developer that is forced to use it.
By tehjoker 2026-02-1019:47 It's a combination of things... it's not just that AI feels like it is stripping the dignity of the human spirit in some ways, but it's also that the work we are doing is often detrimental to our fellow man. So learning to work with AI to do that faster (!!) (if it is actually faster on average), feels like doubling down.
By flatline 2026-02-1021:16 I think it represents a bigger threat than you realize. I can't use an AI for my day job to implement these multi-agent workflows I see. They are all controlled by another company with little or no privacy guarantees. I can run quantized (even more braindead) models locally but my work will be 3-5 years behind the SOTA, and when the SOTA is evolving faster than that timeline there's a problem. At some point there's going to be turnover - like a lake in winter - where AI companies effectively control the development lifecycle end-to-end.
By TechDebtDevin 2026-02-1113:46 [dead]
By alexgarden 2026-02-1016:0219 reply Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different.
Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity.
I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.
These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.
[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it.
With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
By neilellis 2026-02-1018:13 You switch difficulties, like you do in a game. Play on Hard or Survival mode now. Build greater and more amazing things than you ever did before.
We have never, ever, written what the machine executes, even assembly is an abstraction, even in a hex editor. So we all settle for the level of abstraction we like to work at. When we started (those of our age) most of us were assembly (or BASIC) programmers and over time we either increased our level of abstraction or didn't. If you went from assembly -> C -> Java/Python you moved up levels of abstraction. We're not writing in Python or C now, we are writing in natural language and that is compiled to our programming languages. It's just the compiler is still a bit buggy and opinionated!! And yes for some low level coding you still want to check the assembly language, some things need that level of attention.
I learn more in a day coding with AI than I would in a month without it, it's a wonderful two-way exchange, I suggest directions, it teaches me new libraries or techniques that might solve the problem. I lookup those solutions and learn more about my problem space. I feel more like a university student some days than a programmer.
Eventually this will probably be the end of coding and even analytical work. But I think that part is still far off (and possibly longer than we'll still be working for) in the meantime actually this for me is as exciting as the early days of home computing. It won't be fun for ever, the Internet was the coolest thing ever, until it wasn't, but doesn't mean we can't enjoy the summer while it's summer.
>With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them.
That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
By iwontberude 2026-02-1118:49 In my experience, the vast majority of people can't even muster the hubris to think they can understand software at such a basic level, it doesn't matter if GenAI did all the heavy lifting sadly.
By lelanthran 2026-02-1018:442 reply > With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code.
Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
> Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python? Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
By lelanthran 2026-02-1021:38 > Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python?
Maybe. Are they here now?
> Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
No. Being able to solve a problem using Python over C is not even in the same class of being able to solve a problem by asking for it in English.
By metaltyphoon 2026-02-1020:231 reply > in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
By lelanthran 2026-02-1020:40 > It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
Great! I turn from a creator to a babysitter of creators. I'm not seeing the win here.
FWIW, I use LLMs extensively, but not to write the code, to rubber-duck. I have yet to have any LLM paired with any coding agent give me something that I would have written myself.
All the code is at best average. None of the smart stuff comes from them.
By strictnein 2026-02-1017:122 reply I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.
By misir 2026-02-112:21 That’s something LLMs are also presumably good at. At least I’m seeing more and more push to use LLMs at work for ambitious business requirements instead of learning about the problem we’ve been dealing with. Instead of knowing why you are doing what you’re doing, now people are just asking LLMs for specific answers and move on.
Sure some might use it to learn as well, but it’s not necessary and people just yolo the first answer claude gives to them.
By shafoshaf 2026-02-1218:29 Yeah, but I used to be a wizard with arcane knowledge making computers do things others didn't even understand. I was casting fireballs, and now everyone has Find Greater Familiar right out of the gate who does all the heavy lifting. :(
That's because it's like summiting a mountain by taking a skilift to the top. You don't really need to put in the work and anyone can do it.
Sure, and if the reason you're going to the top of the mountain is to deliver supplies to people who need them, you should absolutely take the lift.
By samiv 2026-02-1022:44 Sure but here OP was left wondering why prompting didn't make them feel like they had done/accomplished anything. And the reason is because they didn't do anything worthy of giving them a feeling of accomplishment.
> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode
Which mythical AI are you using that does this?
All the ones I've tried feel like little toddlers that completely miss the point, forget half the requirements mid way, are adamant that they are completely correct then have the gall to act an authority when you point out glaring issues.
I take way less time doing it myself vs coaxing an AI to get a decent solution that catches all edge cases.
AI for me is only useful on subjects I know nothing about, and even then, given I know how bad it is in subjects I know everything about I take everything it says with a megacrystal of salt.
By shafoshaf 2026-02-1218:43 I was extending into the future a little bit. Think of it as playing with a cheat code that let's you have more health or power rather than God mode.
But God mode is on the way. ChatGPT mysteriously went from not understanding SAP ByDesign's WSDLs to having fantastic information over the course of a month. The amount of effort being put into AI isn't about the theoretical limitations of LLMs it is how many everyday problems will AI with all the workarounds and hacks ultimately be able to replace mid life career developers?
By CamperBob2 2026-02-1017:451 reply but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?
If so, other sites beckon.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-1022:511 reply And that's exactly what the person I was replying to seems to be complaining about.
So many people on "Hacker" News could benefit from reading the canonical text on the subject by Steven Levy. A true hacker wants to bring the fire down the mountain. People around here just want to piss on it.
By anonymous908213 2026-02-1016:433 reply > I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.
This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think.
It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades.
All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions?
I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is.
Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.
By ineedasername 2026-02-1017:372 reply >The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing
Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio.
Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it.
Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a place as relic was occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful too.
By neom 2026-02-1018:08 Good news is, no need to be embarrassed: https://s.h4x.club/L1uZqNW4
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:202 reply If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one.
I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.
Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.
Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.
Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.
So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.
At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my fault).
Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.
I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.
By Jare 2026-02-1021:46 I remember a magazine cover that labeled you a gaming god, hard to peak beyond that! The quote you provided back then resonates perfectly with what you describe here: "If there's one message I like to get across to people, I like them to really and truly embrace [the fact that] anything that your imagination can conceive of is possible."
- https://hl-inside.me/magazines/pc-gamer-us/PC-Gamer_2000-11_...
By smallstepforman 2026-02-1023:31 Thank you for creating Homeworld, it truely was a memorable experience.
By robotnikman 2026-02-1017:47 Oh man, modding Company of Heroes was one of the things that got me into programming. I look back fondly on those memories.
By mlhpdx 2026-02-1017:05 I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC) when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it, then found the source code for the game and randomly started changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and simply kept at it until I wasn't.
I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing.
I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore.
That's what it's always been about.
By HoldOnAMinute 2026-02-1016:561 reply For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic".
Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it.
I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
By HoldOnAMinute 2026-02-1020:51 It's this one with bees and a wasp
https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm....
I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great!
I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.
IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:44 The skybox with texture maps was our original plan too. The problem was that GPUs didn't have enough RAM to hold anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup.
Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.
By strictnein 2026-02-1017:19 In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so.
Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast.
Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
By GeoAtreides 2026-02-110:162 reply Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)"
Casts your comment in a different light, I think.
By alexgarden 2026-02-134:36 Actually, I don't really work at an AI startup. My day job is investing in cool companies that push the limits across all sorts of industries (space, defense, disaster response, aviation, etc.)
In the case of Mnemom, all the passion projects I'm working on hit a brick wall that was hard to get past without reliable alignment tools, which I couldn't find anywhere. After 30 years of being an entrepreneur, it's hard to walk away from an obvious need.
Also... regarding disclosure, I put it in my bio. :)
By soulofmischief 2026-02-110:201 reply Appeal to identity. Prejucide and bias. Not considering an enthusiast of a technology might actually want to get paid working with that technology. Shameful comment all around.
By GeoAtreides 2026-02-110:371 reply Disclosing conflicting of interest is standard practice. People writing about economics do disclose when holding relevant shares.
In the end, it's a simple question: Are the opinions stated sincere or does the author have a pecuniary interest which might make things a bit more subjective?
By soulofmischief 2026-02-112:16 What is the conflict of interest? Guy working for AI company says he likes working with AI?
By CoastalCoder 2026-02-1018:032 reply The original Homeworld team was casting spells!
I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense.
That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.
By kinneticslammer 2026-02-1019:36 Amen to this. The optimization the team did blows my mind… whenever I think of it I think of if someone made Crysis run on the NES without compromises.
The soundtrack was stellar, and introduced me to Barber (Adagio for Strings).
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:241 reply Thanks... It was magical at the time... I've thought a lot about why it was magical over the years... I think if you boil away all the space stuff, Homeworld was a story about people who knew in their hearts that they were special and destined for something greater than the universe was willing to allow. And they went through hell to discover that they were right. Looking back, I think that's a story a lot of us on this thread (inc. me) can relate to.
Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
By CoastalCoder 2026-02-1018:371 reply Sounds like there's some overlap with the story of the Jewish people, now that I think of it.
> Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
I doubt it's permanent, and we all gotta eat.
But you know what? My son still tells me how much he was in awe of that game when he saw me playing it.
No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:45
^^ Made my day. Tell your son he's rad.> No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
By Lerc 2026-02-1016:31 I'm feeling the same.
AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga.
An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.
By quietsegfault 2026-02-1018:16 I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.
By tootie 2026-02-113:53 I'm nigh on 50 and feel very differently. I honestly loved the 2010s and the adoption of frameworks, SaaS, continuous deployment, cloud and even agile. Delivering software felt a lot more professional and less artisan which I really appreciated. I can fondly recall opening 4 ssh windows and running tail -f on every prod server log, but using New Relic or the like is just way, way better. It feels more satisfying to clearly define a feature and deploy it with certainty. It may also be a product of just moving up the seniority ranks and being more exposed to business.
All that being said, I think a side effect of being this age is not really enjoying anything as much as I used to. Coding is still fun, but the magic faded a while ago. My oldest kid is applying to college and she loves coding, but I'm nudging her to do either math or engineering because just learning CS doesn't seem like it's going to be as rewarding as it was 25 years ago.
By maxfurman 2026-02-1019:44 I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative, looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!
By upmostly 2026-02-1018:41 First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation.
I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2.
That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub.
Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps.
Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app.
The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.
Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together. 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and dyscalculia, being a real programmer was never in the cards for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I'll be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up the hammer myself.
These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.
By alexgarden 2026-02-1016:15 Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the world when all of us find the passion to create again.
Why is your last paragraph nearly identical to the last paragraph you are replying to? It might have been a strange quirk, but there’s also been the suggestion that the post you’re replying to is an imposter, so it gets weirder that you also did that.
By neom 2026-02-1017:28 I thought I was being cute. :) I'm not a bot. I reached out to Alex and he confirmed the original comment was indeed him.
> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.
I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:25 For sure. Docker is rad (sorry Docker!)... all I'm saying is that I am not proud of the fact that I can do it and I don't think it moves the awesome needle - but it's still hard to get right and a pain in the ass. It's just an example of something I appreciate that I can automate now.
By reactordev 2026-02-1020:01 Wholeheartedly agree.
And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and engineers…
Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld shaped me in ways I couldn’t even tell you.
Yes yes yes!!!
I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games.
Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc).
But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.
By dingnuts 2026-02-1016:41 [dead]
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations.
I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
By acoard 2026-02-1017:24 I think this works unironically. My mother is an avid gardener and can spend 8 hours a day gardening. When her life circumstances allowed for it, she hired a once a week gardener to do the tasks she didn't like (or had difficulties doing as a small woman), and still gardens the same amount. I've teased her for hiring a gardener, but she swears it's a huge help and boost to her gardening quality of life.
this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark.
I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.
I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.
It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.
By mrandish 2026-02-1018:05 > people ... are motivated by different things.
I agree and would add that it's not just different people, it can be the same person in different modes. Sometimes I enjoying making the thing, other times I just want to enjoy having the thing.
By quietsegfault 2026-02-1018:20 Your grieving doesn’t have to shit all over my personal enjoyment and contentment. Me enjoying the use of AI in developing software doesn’t take anything away from your ability to grieve or dislike it. I’m not asking you to be excited, I’m asking you not to frame my enjoyment as naive, harmful, or lesser.
Your feelings are yours, mine are mine, and they can coexist just fine. The problem only shows up when your grief turns into value judgments about the people who feel differently.
By nlawalker 2026-02-1019:16 I don't disagree, but I think it would benefit everyone to be clear, upfront and honest with themselves and others about exactly what's being lost and grieved. The weeds are still growing and our hands are still available to pull them, so it's not that.
By mlaretallack 2026-02-1017:501 reply I agree with this, I put myself in the "glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do" camp, so the end game is somthing cool, now I can do 3 cool things before lunch instead of 3 cool things a year
But, almost by definition of how LLMs work, if it’s that easy then someone else did it before and the AI is just copying their work for you. This doesn’t fit well with my idea of glorious hacks to bend the machine, personally. I don’t know, maybe it just breaks my self-delusion that I am special and make unique things. At least I get to discover for myself what is possible and how, and hold a sliver of hope that I did something new. Maybe at least my journey there was unique, whereas everyone using an AI basically has the same journey and same destination (modulo random seed I guess.)
By CamperBob2 2026-02-1117:07 Essentially nothing we do as programmers is special or unique. Whatever we're doing, there's a 99.999% chance that somebody, somewhere did it first, just in a different context. The key point is, now we can avoid duplicating that person's effort. I don't see the downside.
Put another way: all of the code that needed to be written has now been written. Now we can move on to more interesting things.
What will really bake peoples' noodles is when it becomes apparent that the same is true for literature. I won't mind if I'm not around to witness that... but it will happen.
By dutchCourage 2026-02-1019:48 I think the people who like shipping quickly probably don't like building products in the first place and are looking for other aspects of entrepreneurship.
A huge benefit I find in AI is that it helps with a lot of things I hated. Merge conflicts, config files, breaking dependency updates... That leaves me more time to focus on the actual functionalities so I end up with better APIs, more detailed UIs, and more thorough tests. I do think it's possible to be relevant/competitive by only delegating parts of the work to AI and not the whole thing. Though it might change if AI gets too good.
By jablongo 2026-02-1018:56 This is a valid point, the good news is I think there is some hope in developing the craft of orchestrating many agents into something that is satisfying and rewarding in it's own right.
By newswasboring 2026-02-1017:231 reply Having opencode doesn't preclude me from making elegant code. It just takes away the carpel tunnel.
By grayhatter 2026-02-1018:163 reply > I created this with some kind of genai
To me, it just feels like plagiarism. Can you explain why it doesn't feel like plagiarism to you?
By quietsegfault 2026-02-1018:221 reply Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s specific work as your own. Using a generative tool is closer to using a compiler, an IDE, or a library. I’m not copying a person’s code or submitting someone else’s project with the name filed off. I’m directing a system, reviewing the output, editing it, and taking responsibility for the result.
If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.
By newswasboring 2026-02-119:40 The same reason why using a generator like antlr doesn't feel like plagiarism to me. I don't outsource thinking to these models, only coding. My spec files contain the architecture, and details of intent on each interface. That is the part of the work that actually matters, rest of it is just code monkey stuff. While I am sad I don't get the peace and satisfaction of churning out code, my primary goal is to make cool things not coding.
edit: typo.
Where do you draw your line between plagiarism and creativity? I learned in art school this question is more difficult to answer than it appears when taken seriously.
*I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is really making me enjoy landscape design again!
By jablongo 2026-02-1018:50 I'm so excited about landscape architecture now that I can tell my gardener to create an equivalent to the gardens at versailles for $5. Sometimes he plants the wrong kind of plant or makes a dead end path, but he fixes his work very quickly.
By small_model 2026-02-1017:461 reply The proper analogy would be you can now remove all weeds with the swipe of your hand and cut all your hedges with another swipe, you still are gardening you can do it quicker and therefore explore different possibilities.
By munificent 2026-02-1020:382 reply For some, the feeling of pulling those weeds out is inseparable from the holistic experience they think of as "gardening".
By neom 2026-02-1021:16 Maybe this isn't directly related to what you're saying and I'm not attacking it, I'm just thinking out loud: What would it mean to master gardening then? I've never gardened in my life but I grew up in Scotland around estate houses and castles, my friends dads were gardeners and each of them seems to be specialists in their own area, many working on the same estate, so what exactly is this "holistic experience of gardening"?
By small_model 2026-02-1021:151 reply So using weedkiller isn't gardening to these people?
By munificent 2026-02-1021:37 My point is just that if there are 10 different activities that produce the same resulting object, they aren't necessarily the same activities in the minds of the participants solely because the output is the same.
The process and experience matters too.
By dirkc 2026-02-1017:41 Oh, the joy that awaits you when you come back home to discover how the gardener interpreted "please trim the hedge by the gate a little".
No you didn’t. You lead a team of gardeners to develop your grand vision. Or you directed an epic movie leading a cast of talented actors bringing your vision to life. You can choose an empowering analogy or a negative one it’s your choice.
By alexgarden 2026-02-1018:271 reply Yeah... a team of gardeners who might, with no warning, decide to burn down your house to create some extra fertilizer for the rose garden. Sometimes I wonder...
By dave_sid 2026-02-1213:13 Think you need to work on your use of AI and not just copy paste 10000 lines and hope for the best.
By NeutralCrane 2026-02-111:46 Are directors frauds because they aren’t the ones doing the acting? Is there no joy in being an architect because they aren’t the one assembling the building at the construction site? Is there no value in product engineering because they aren’t fabricating the products in the factory?
It’s fine to find enjoyment in the actual programming part of software engineering. It’s stupid to assume that is the only aspect of software engineering that is valuable or that is enjoyable for others.
By jojva 2026-02-1020:29 Your comment is interesting because it shows how engineers view their work: through the product, i.e the why, or through the craft, i.e the how.
What you consider "exciting", as a theoretical gardener, is the act of taking care of the plants. What OP finds it exciting is that they may now get a team of gardeners that'll build a Versailles-like garden for free.
By quietsegfault 2026-02-1018:17 I used to be big into amateur radio. When I was considering to build a tower, I would have paid someone to build the tower for me and do the climbing work to mount stuff on the tower. Your statement is nonsensical, because it assumes that there is a binary choice between "do everything yourself" and "delegate everything".
By QuantumGood 2026-02-1018:57 By artificially narrowing a multi-faceted issue to just two either/or simplistic options you are no longer describing the issue. If you ackknowledge this, you can comment on it. But not acknowledging it makes your comment hard to parse. Sarcarsm? Overly simplistic? Missing context? Unclear.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1019:44 If I were the architect of a large building that I designed from the blueprints, the interior, etc, I wouldn’t feel bad that I didn’t install the toilets myself. AI agents are the plumbers, the painters, the electricians, etc
By theonething 2026-02-1019:04 How about hiring a gardener to do some of the stuff and you can focus doing the part of the gardening/landscaping that is important to you and you enjoy?
I think that's a more accurate (and charitable) analogy than yours.
By whattheheckheck 2026-02-1017:513 reply Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away
By recursive 2026-02-1021:18 It's the making, not the having. If I'm selling these gardens, surely it's better to have more. If I enjoy the act of making the garden, then there's no reason I ever need to finish the first one.
This analogy has probably outstayed its usefulness.
By grayhatter 2026-02-1018:17 Surely you have 10-30 examples you want to share?
Or even just 1 or 2?
By munificent 2026-02-1020:401 reply What's so great about having 10 or 30 gardens?
By tkfoss 2026-02-1116:48 A lot of people go through the life never experiencing deep dedication and intimate relationship with something or someone. I noticed its often children who had less toys & space and learned to pay attention to every nook and crazy, letting their imagination fill the boredom, tend to appreciate things more deeply later in life.
By flowerthoughts 2026-02-1020:45 Well, the gardener isn't going to cut down your roses to the ground as they are about to go into bloom because s/he mistook it for the weed they were just working on.
By moffkalast 2026-02-1016:591 reply Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.
By zeroonetwothree 2026-02-1017:561 reply Speak for yourself. I have always loved the act of intentionally typing (converting my thoughts into structured text).
By moffkalast 2026-02-1018:201 reply I guess some people enjoy the process, but you can still do that.
It's like with machinists and 3D printers, you can always spend 10 hours on the lathe to make something but most of the time it's more practical to just get the part so one can get on with what actually needs doing.
By chasd00 2026-02-1018:50 > It's like with machinists and 3D printers
that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I think there's a group of people that derive joy and satisfaction from using the part they designed and there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the part as designed. Same for software, some people are thrilled because they can get the software they imagine while others dread not producing the software people imagine.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-1017:182 reply As mosburger says, this is a great analogy. Do you think that the great artists paint, sculpt, and draw everything by hand, by themselves? Of course not... they never did, and they don't today. You're being offered the ability to join their ranks.
It's your studio now. You have a staff of apprentices standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
By duskdozer 2026-02-1111:48 I don't want to be a manager, though. If I did, I would have gone into management.
By CamperBob2 2026-02-1017:412 reply No, it's not.
If you want things to stay the same forever, you shouldn't go into technology, art, or gardening. Try plumbing, masonry, or religion.
By zeroonetwothree 2026-02-1017:571 reply The truth is that you wouldn’t be saying that if the change had been in a direction you don’t like.
I just actually thought that many of the great artists absolutely did paint, sculpt, or draw their creations "by hand", themselves. I suppose they used tools: the brush, chisel, pencil. Not sure how comparable those are to having an LLM write code for you.
By iwontberude 2026-02-1017:03 Yeah it’s drugs and or religion. Feels pretty good.
