This is a complaint someone is making about their job propspects thinly wrapped in floral language. I know for some people (it seems especially prominent in Americans I've found) their identity is linked to their job. This is a chance to work on this. You can decouple yourself and redefine yourself as a person.

Who knows? Once you're done you may go write some code for fun again.

I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.

If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.

The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).

For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.

When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.

When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.

Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.

Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.

I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into this field for seemingly very different reasons.

I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I usually have when working on codebase myself.

Your craft is not my craft.

It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general...

If you are making something that exists, or something that is very similar to something that exists, odds are that an LLM can be made to generate code which approximates that thing. The LLM encoding is lossy. How will you adjust the output to recover the loss? What process will you go through mentally to bridge the gap? When does the gap appear? How do you recognize it? In the absolute best case you are given a highly visible error. Perhaps you've even shipped it, and need to provide context about the platform and circumstances to further elucidate. Better hope that platform and circumstance is old-hat.

I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience.

Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any form of human creation?

Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes.

Should he mourn the loss of our craft. Also yes.

Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone.

Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve.

Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.

Yes, watching an LLM spit out lots of code is for sure mesmerizing. Small tasks usually work ok, code kinda compiles, so for some scenarios it can work out.. but anyone serious about software development can see how piece of crap the code is.

LLMs are great tools overall, great to bounce ideas, great to get shit done. If you have a side project and no time, awesome.. If your boss/company has a shitty culture and you just want to get the task done, great. Got a mundane coding task, hate coding, or your code wont run in a critical environment? please, LLM that shit over 9000..

Remember though, an LLM is just a predictor, a noisy, glorified text predictor. Only when AI reaches a point of not optimizing for short term gains and has built-in long term memory architecture (similar to humans) AND can produce some linux kernel level code and size, then we can talk..

I might be mistaken, but I bet they said the same when Visual Basic came out.

1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.

2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.

These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.

AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.

I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.

This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and read and listen to.

You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills.

People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing.

It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.

Musicians mourned synthesizers. Illustrators mourned Photoshop. Typesetters mourned desktop publishing. In every case the people who thrived weren't the ones who refused the new tool or the ones who blindly adopted it. They were the ones who understood that the tool absorbed the mechanical layer while the taste layer became more valuable, not less.

The real shift isn't from hand-coding to AI-coding. It's from "I express intent through syntax" to "I express intent through constraints and review." That's still judgment. Still craft. Just a different substrate.

What we're actually mourning is the loss of effort as a signal of quality. When anyone can generate working code, the differentiator moves upstream to architecture, to knowing what to build, to understanding why one approach fails at scale and another doesn't. Those are harder skills, not easier ones.

Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.

> Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming.

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it.

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/

If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI hype), might want to go read that post.

I still feel proud when skillfully guiding a set of AI agents to build from my imagination. Especially when it was out of my reach just 6-months ago.

I’m a 49 year old veteran who started at just 10 years old and have continued to find pure passion in it.

But I am still quite annoyed at the slopful nature of the code that is produced when you're not constantly nagging it to do better

We've RLed it to produce code that works by hook or by crook, putting infinity fallback paths and type casts everywhere rather than checking what the semantics should be.

Sadly I don't know how we RL taste.

Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching

The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job.

This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (overseeing farm automation, high end handmade furniture, small organic farms), and the factory worker masses (ZIRP enabled tech workers) will move on to more fulfulling work.

I find myself, ironically, spending more time typing out great code by hand now. Maybe some energy previously consumed by tedium has been freed up, or maybe the wacky machines brought a bit of the whimsy back into the process for me.

[0] And in programming, for the readers of Zed Shaw's books :)

I’m in consulting now and it’s all the same crap. Enterprises want to “unleash AI” so they can fire people. Maximize profits. My nephews who are just starting their careers are blindly using these tools and accepting the PR if it builds. Not if it’s correct.

I’m in awe of what it can do but I also am not impressed with the quality of how it does it.

I’m fortunate to not have any debt so I can float until the world either wises up or the winds of change push me in a new direction.

I liked the satisfaction of building something “right” that was also “useful”. The current state of Opus and Codex can only pretend to do the latter.

What I do mourn is the reliability. We're in this weird limbo where it's like rolling a die for every piece of work. If it comes up 1-5, I would have been better off implementing it myself. If it comes up 6, it'll get it done orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Since the overall speedup is worthwhile, I have to try it every time, even if most of the time it fails. And of course it's a moving target, so I have to keep trying the things that failed yesterday because today's models are more capable.

After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted.

My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my confusion.

Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation is free, judgment becomes priceless.

We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now, which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design, tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach.

This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder, rather than just for coordinates.

I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me.

We'll still be sitting till 2am.

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

I've been hearing this for the last two years. And yet, LLMs, given abstract description of the problem, still write worse code than I do.

Or did you mean type code? Because in that case, yes, I'd agree. They type better.

If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language.

But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all.

So here we're seeing yet another text about how the world of software was solved by AI and being a developer is an artifact of the past.

It's also important to step back and realize that it goes way beyond coding. Coding is just the deepest tooth of the jagged frontier. In 3 years there will be blog posts lamenting the "death of law firms" and the "death of telemedicine". Maybe in 10 years it will be the death of everything. We're all in the same boat, and this boat is taking us to a world where everyone is more empowered, not less. But still, there will be that cutting edge in any field that will require real ingenuity to push forward.

It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm just getting a lot more done.

AI has a ways to go before it's senior level if it ever reaches that level, but I do feel bad for juniors that survive this who never will have the opportunity to sculpt code by hand.

My headspace is now firmly in "great, I'm beginning to understand the properties and affordances of this new medium, how do I maximise my value from it", hopefully there's more than a few people who share this perspective, I'd love to talk with you about the challenges you experience, I know I have mine, maybe we have answers to each others problems :)

I assume that the current set of properties can change, however it seems like some things are going to be easier than others, for example multi modal reasoning still seems to be a challenge and I'm trying to work out if that's just hard to solve and will take a while or if we're not far from a good solution

I mourn a little bit that in 20 years possibly 50% of software jobs will get axed or unless you are elite/celebrity dev salary will stagnate. I mourn that in the future upward mobility and moving up into upper middle class will be harder without trying to be entrepreneur.

Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.

Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best.

If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to rewrite this code myself all over again.

Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds of toxic gas along the way.

That's the future for maybe half of programmers.

Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.

Perhaps Im a cynic but I don't know

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.

I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.

Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most people are nowadays.

And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are - like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least, soon enough it won’t be. I can fret about deskilling all I like, but it seems that soon enough these skills won’t be particularly valuable except as a form of entertainment.

Perhaps the coding agents won’t be able to make certain things or use certain techniques. That was the case for textile manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we see it in each others’ work.

It’s not a terrible future, I suppose, in à long enough view. The world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and other similar points in history, not until after we get through another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won’t start quite so many wars while they enjoy their power trips.

We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!

Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries.

I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.

When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of programming/computing is going to be interesting.

Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases, ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the age of AI.

All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is changing as it always has. The only constant I've ever experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for me.

As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.

If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.

Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.

I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using?

The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself.

I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!

Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress.

A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value.

How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.

But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die.

The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels.

As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.

Speak for yourself. They produce shit code and have terrible judgment. Otherwise we wouldn't need to babysit them so much.

I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow.

If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine.

But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose.

It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous.

If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.

So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well, then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess

guy who doesn't realize we still use hammers. This article was embarrassing to read.

* People still craft wood furniture from felled trees entirely with hand tools. Some even make money doing it by calling it 'artisanal'. Nothing is stopping anyone from coding in any historical mode they like. Toggle switches, punch cards, paper tape, burning EPROMs, VT100, whatever.

* OP seems to be lamenting he may not be paid as much to expend hours doing "sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM." I've been there. Sometimes I'd feel mild satisfaction on solving a rat-hole problem but more often, it was significant relief. I never much liked that part of coding and began to see it as a failure mode. I found I got bigger bucks - and had more fun - the better I got at avoiding rat-hole problems in the first place.

* My entire journey creating software from ~1983 to ~2020 was about making a thing that solved someone's problem better, cheaper or faster - and, on a good day, we managed all three at once. At various times I ended up doing just about every aspect of it from low-level coding to CEO and back again, sometimes in the same day. Every role in the journey had major challenges. Some were interesting, a few were enjoyable, but most were just "what had to get done" to drag the product I'd dreamt up kicking and screaming into existence.

* From my first teenage hobby project to my first cassette-tape in-a-baggie game to a $200M revenue SaaS for F100, every improvement in coding from getting a floppy disk drive to an assembler with macros to an 80 column display to version control, new languages, libraries, IDEs and LLMs just helped "making the thing exist" be easier, faster and less painful.

* Eventually, to create even harder, bigger and better things I had to add others coding alongside me. Stepping into the player-coach role amplified my ability to bring new things into existence. It wasn't much at first because I had no idea how to manage programmers or projects but I started figuring it out and slowly got better. On a good day, using an LLM to help me "make the thing exist" feels a lot like when I first started being a player-coach. The frustration when it's 'two steps forward, one back' feels like deja vu. Much like current LLMs, my first part-time coding helpers weren't as good as I was and I didn't yet know how to help them do their best work. But it was still a net gain because there were more of them than me.

* The benefits of having more coders helping me really started paying off once I started recruiting coders who were much better programmers than I ever was. Getting there took a little ego adjustment on my part but what a difference! They had more experience, applied different patterns, knew to avoid problems I'd never seen and started coming up with some really good ideas. As LLMs get better and I get better at helping them help me - I hope that's were we're headed. It doesn't feel directionally different than the turbo-boost from my first floppy drive, macro-assembler, IDE or profiler but the impact is already greater with upside potential that's much higher still - and that's exciting.

My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code.

And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.

That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about.

Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job.

I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.

But software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction so that we don't repeat ourselves and make each next step even more powerful.

Just yesterday we were pair programming with a talented junior AI developer. Today we are treating them as senior ones and can work with several in parallel. Very soon your job will not be pair programming and peer reviewing at all, but teaching a team of specialized coworkers to work on your project. In a year or two we will be assembling factories of such agents that will handle the process from taking your requirements to delivering and maintaining complex software. Our jobs are going to change many more times and much more often than ever.

And yet there will still be people finding solace in hand-crafting their tools, or finding novel algorithms, or adding the creativity aspect into the work of their digital development teams. Like people lovingly restoring their old cars in their garage just for the sake of the process itself.

And everything will be just fine.

2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i provide very specific prompts

3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay your bills every month is something i could do when my parents paid my bills

These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or Opus producing the code.

Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.

I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!"

I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games, chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I could see and experience the value of the internet immediately. It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible.

LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved." It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs—and there are always bugs.

Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.

I feel generative AI is being imposed onto society. While it is a time-saving tool for many applications, I also think there are many domains where generative AI needs to be evaluated much more cautiously. However, there seems to be relentless pressure to “move fast and break things,” to adopt technology due to its initial labor-saving benefits without fully evaluating its drawbacks. That’s why I feel generative AI is an imposition.

I also resent the power and control that Big Tech has over society and politics, especially in America where I live. I remember when Google was about indexing the Web, and I first used Facebook when it was a social networking site for college students. These companies became successful because they provided useful services to people. Unfortunately, once these companies gained our trust and became immensely wealthy, they started exploiting their wealth and power. I will never forget how so many Big Tech leaders sat at Trump’s second inauguration, some of whom got better seats than Trump’s own wife and children. I highly resent OpenAI’s cornering of the raw wafer market and the subsequent exorbitant hikes in RAM and SSD prices.

Honestly, I have less of an issue with large language models themselves and more of an issue with how a tiny handful of powerful people get to dictate the terms and conditions of computing for society. I’m a kid who grew up during the personal computing revolution, when computation became available to the general public. I fell for the “computers for the rest of us,” “information at your fingertips” lines. I wanted to make a difference in the world through computing, which is why I pursued a research career and why I teach computer science.

I’ve also sat and watched research industry-wide becoming increasingly driven by short-term business goals rather than by long-term visions driven by the researchers themselves. I’ve seen how “publish-and-perish” became the norm in academia, and I also saw DOGE’s ruthless cuts in research funding. I’ve seen how Big Tech won the hearts and minds of people, only for it to leverage its newfound power and wealth to exploit the very people who made Big Tech powerful and wealthy.

The tech industry has changed, and not for the better. This is what I mourn.

Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it.

What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-paid remuneration, to write software line-by-line.

I’ll not pretend that I don’t get the point, but it feels like the lamentation of a baker, tailor, shoemaker, or smith, missing the days of old.

And yet, most people prefer a world with affordable bread, clothes, footware, and consumer goods.

Will the world benefit the most from “affordable” software? Maybe yes, maybe not, there are many arguments on both sides. I am more concerned the impact on the winners and losers, the rich will get more rich and powerful, while the losers will become even more destitute.

Yet, my final point would be: it is better or worse to live in a world in which software is more affordable and accessible?

I wonder if there are some interesting groupings.

No they cannot, And an AI bro squeezing every talking point into a think piece while pretending to have empathy doesn't change that. You just want an exit, and you want it fast.

I often have one programming project I do myself, on the side, and recently I've been using coding agents. Their average ability is no doubt impressive for what they are. But they also make mistakes that not even a recent CS graduate with no experience would ever make (e.g. I asked the agent for it's guess as to why a test is failing; it suggested it might be due to a race condition with an operation that is started after the failing assertion). As a lead, if someone on the team is capable of making such a mistake even once, then that person can't really code, regardless of their average performance (just as someone who sometimes lands a plane in the wrong airport or even crashes without their being a catastrophich condition outside their control can't really fly regardless of their average performance). "This is more complicated than we though and would take longer than we expected" is something you hear a lot, but "sorry, I got confused" is something you never hear. A report by Anthropic last week said, "Claude will work autonomously to solve whatever problem I give it. So it’s important that the task verifier is nearly perfect, otherwise Claude will solve the wrong problem." Yeah, that's not something a team lead faces. I wish the agent could work like a team of programmers and I would be doing my familiar role of a project lead, but it doesn't.

The models do some things well. I believe that programming is an interesting mix of inductive and deductive thinking (https://pron.github.io/posts/people-dont-write-programs), and the models have the inductive part down. They can certainly understand what a codebase does faster than I can. But their deductive reasoning, especially when it comes to the details, is severely lacking (e.g. I asked the agent to document my code. It very quickly grasped the design and even inferred some important invariants, but when it saw an `assert` in one subroutine it documented it as guarding a certain invariant. The intended invariant was correct, it just wasn't the one the assertion was guarding). So I still (have to) work as a programmer when working with coding assistants, even if in a different way.

I've read about great successes at using coding agents in "serious" software, but what's common to those cases is that the people using the agents (Mitchell Hashimoto, antirez) are experts in the respective codebase. At the other end of the spectrum, people who aren't programmers can get some cool programs done, but I've yet to see anything produced in this way (by a non programmer) that I would call serious software.

I don't know what the future will bring, but at the moment, the craft isn't dead. When AI can really program, i.e. the experience is really like that of a team lead, I don't think that the death of programming would concern us, because once they get to that point, the agents will also likely be able to replace the team lead. And middle management. And the CTO, the CFO, and the CEO, and most of the users.

I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts, still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of software development becomes something akin to googling--just typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at least, we don't pay them very much.

I could not be having a better time.

I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow, and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a weekend.

But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I wanted to be doing. I feel incredibly relieved, feel such enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it's way to the rest of the world, possibly.

Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that. But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with incredible raw excitement and possibility before me.

That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people working really hard together to build amazing systems.

Oh come on. 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.

And you still need plans.

Can you write a plan for a sturdy house, verify that it meets the plan that your nails went all the way in and in the right places?

You sure can.

Your product person, your directors, your clients might be able to do the same thing, it might look like a house but its a fire hazard, or in the case of most LLM generated code a security one.

The problem is that we moved to scrum and agile, where your requirements are pantomime and postit notes if your lucky, interpretive dance if you arent. Your job is figuring out how to turn that into something... and a big part of what YOU as an engineer do is tell other people "no thats dumb" without hurting their feelings.

IF AI coding is going to be successful then some things need to change: Requirements need to make a come back. GOOD UI needs to make a comeback (your dark pattern around cancelation, is now going to be at odds with an agent). Your hide the content behind a login or a pay wall wont work any more because again, end users have access too... the open web is back and by force. If a person can get in, we have code that can get in now.

There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, more than ever, stop looking back and start looking forward, because once you get past the hate and the hype there is a ton of potential to right some of the ill's of the last 20 years of tech.

It's not that impressive that Claude wrote a C compiler when GitHub has the code to a bunch of C compilers (some SOTA) just sitting there.

I'm using an LLM to write a compiler in my spare time (for fun) for a "new" language. It feels more like a magical search engine than coding assistant. It's great for bouncing ideas from, for searching the internet without the clutter of SEO optimized sites and ads, it's definitely been useful, just not that useful for code.

Like, I have used some generated code in a very low stakes project (my own Quickshell components) and while it kind of worked, eventually I refactored it myself into 1/3 of the lines it produced and had to squash some bugs.

It's probably good enough for the people who were gluing React components together but it still isn't on the level where I'd put any code it produces into production anywhere I care about.

I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages.

The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done. Seeing my ideas have impact.

What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type the code in anymore.

Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now.

I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think. Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm already delivering things that were on the roadmap for engineering months worth of effort.

I can think about abstractions, architecture, math, organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame compiler thinks about my code.

And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are astronomically more productive than juniors.

The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate.

The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses.

I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.

And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back.

I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!

Sure, they are still needed for debugging and for sneering at all those juniors and non-programmers who will finally be able to materialise their fantasies, but there is no way back anymore, and like riding horses, you can still do it while owning a car.

You think its just SWE? It will be accountants, customer service, factory workers, medical assistance basically anyone who doesn't work with their hands directly, and they'll try to solve that here soon too and alienate them too.

Look at who's in charge, do you think they're going to give us UBI? No, they're going to sign us up to go fight wars to help them accumulate resources. Stop supporting this, they're going to make us so poor young men will beg to fight in a war. Its the same playbook from the first half of the 20th Century.

You think I'm paranoid, give it 5 years.

We are at all time high's in the stock market/equities and they've laid off 400k SWE's in the last 16 months. While going on podcasts to tell us we are going to have more time to create and do what we love. We have to work to pay our bills. We don't want whats coming, but they're selling us some lie that this will solve all our problems, it will solve the ruling classes problems that will be it. You will have no bargaining chips and you will be forced to take whatever morsels given to you.

Your competency will be directly correlated 1:1 to the quantity and quality of tokens that you can afford, given access too (or loaned??) We're literally at the beginning of a black mirror episode before it gets dark.

People that grew up in the Capitalist West have been brainwashed since they were 10 years old they they can be a billionaire too, no you can't there's 2k-3k of them and 8 billion of us.

These automation tools are the ultimate weapon for the ruling class to strip all value of you from your labor, and you're embracing that as a miracle. Its not, your life is in the process of being torn of all meaning.

Good luck to everyone who agrees, we're going to need it.. Anyone supporting these companies or helping enhance these model's capabilities, you're a class traitor and soon to be slave.

Required reading: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...

fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility.

a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a digital archive-brain.

also:

> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.

no we won't lol wtf

but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time

Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money.

I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do? One less adversary.

I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating together… but he's acting against those interests and he's doomering and I have no more time for that.