I was chatting with a friend who commits on a very well known open source project (~80K stars). He is disillusioned not because the robots aren't good at what they do -- they totally are. The sad thing is that he enjoyed writing code and working with the community on improvements because it was a very human, collaborative thing to do. So, while the robots are great at pushing the project forward even faster and doing fantastic things for security and performance, the joy is gone.
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this. I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't alone in that feeling.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.
I have very mixed feelings.
- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would
require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow
- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy
- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).
- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.
- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us
Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.
However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.
Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.
Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.
I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate
feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along
with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't
alone in that feeling.
This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.
> not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities.
Those are the parts the LLM is bad at. The 1% of stuff that was interesting was worth looking forward to.
I’m unconvinced about architecture mattering much. I used to think that, but these days I’m leaning towards it being the product of a problem we don’t have anymore. Architecture used to be dangerous and time-consuming to redo. If an AI can do that safely for $100 or $1000 in tokens (one day), that ROI is maybe negative
I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.
Obviously this is not true for every SWE. A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI. I see people that struggle because they've identified with the writing code part a lot and that's gone now that the machine is doing it, I bet that's hard.
Yes. The people that didn't enjoy coding say that.
AI is great enabler for stuff that you don't want to be good at, it cut a ton of chore type jobs out of my workflow, but for stuff you do want to get better and care for, it's both joy killer, and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.
I enjoy coding deeply, and my feelings are not that simple.
I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.
I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.
Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.
As I like to tell others: before my job was 70% architecture & patterns and 30% coding & algorithms. Now my job is 100% architecture & patterns. While I still spend the majority of my time on architecture & patterns, and while I enjoy this aspect more than coding and algorithms, I am still working a "different job" than I was when my hands steered the code completely.
People say stuff like this all the time, but what does it actually mean? Like, isn’t the details of the code, at least at some level, part of the “architecture”? I’m so curious about what people who say this are actually making where they just sit around all day and dream up new lego structures without ever having to look at any of the bricks.
That's a very simplistic view. I'm very good at writing tests and I'm happy to offload writing tests to LLMs, as long as they follow the structure I've provided.
You're saying that I must not be good in writing tests, irregardless on how I feel about test writing.
People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of them were in technology. I hope agents quickly become good enough to completely commoditize any supposed function they perform, and forces them to leave this industry.
This is an extremely “all or nothing” take. I love computers and started programming in elementary school. I am having more fun now building software than I can remember.
I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.
But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.
I’m glad you mentioned flow state because that’s exactly the high I’m trying to chase with AI and why I like it despite programming since elementary school as well.
I realized I most enjoy higher level problem solving but don’t really enjoy implementation. Like I enjoy algorithms, data structures, memory allocation strategies, SIMD optimization, etc. But writing the code, and debugging it is tedious and takes me out of flow.
And if I’m really interested in the project itself then the algorithms take a back seat and I enjoy the even higher level problem solving of building a cool project.
I don’t think it makes you lesser to enjoy these things more than literally banging out code, and hunting down bugs. Perhaps I’ve written enough code that I don’t find the same joy in that. Who knows.
I love writing code, but I don't love every single part of writing code. In particular, I really disliked getting stuck on some irrelevant detail, some mysterious error that had nothing to do with my code (dep issues, OS quirks, silent changes, auth failures, researching alternatives), and spinning my tires, unable to work on what I wanted to accomplish. Often I never made it through the far side; I've got a project directory littered with half-finished projects.
Having an AI to figure all that junk out for me so I can focus on the thing I want to build is fantastic. I worry about losing the grip I still have, but for now I've lost some things I loved (a lot of actual code-writing, solving nice straightforward problems), but gained what might as well be superpowers to help with some real shortcomings I had. It's been a net-positive trade for me so far.
And none of my personal projects have made me rich yet...
You can love technology and still have thought that coding was a required path to get to technology and not the ends unto itself.
If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.
It’s not the act of coding, you have to really hate problem solving, to love managing agents. Such people are only in it for the money, it may sound disparaging but it’s just true.
If tech paid less, say minimum wage, they would all leave and none of them would ever tinker around anything in their free time. I’m not depressed, I’m just disappointed by how many folks are like that in this industry I loved.
There are infinite problems and agents help us solve problems faster. Sure they're not coding puzzles, they're actual problems actual human beings have, but they're still problems. Id way rather help a school district track its roster properly than argue with eslint. I'd rather get a rocket to the moon than triage garbage collection quirks too.
You're certainly welcome to miss what coding was, but being rude to engineers who are trying to build businesses is just as ridiculous and entitled as this article is.
If agent did all the technical work of sending a rocket to the moon, and all that was left for me was deciding whether a rocket to the moon should be built or one to mars, which is better for our “customers” and I actually enjoyed that then I would be honest and say I was never into technology, which is completely fine, majority of humanity isn’t into it.
I don’t need to see why you feel the desperate need to larp as a technologist when you’re happy with letting an agent solve all the technical problems.
You only think it is rude because you have tied your identity to being a technologist when you are not, I’m just saying it like it is.
> I don’t need to see why you feel the desperate need to larp as a technologist when you’re happy with letting an agent solve all the technical problems.
This is a false comparison. Agents cannot solve all the technical problems, so the entire statement falls apart.
Why did you expand it from what he said? I love technology, I enjoy being able to solve problems with technology and coding. I've always felt neutral about the actual act of coding, it was always just a means to the end and now I love that I can do more problem solving in less time and with less toil (from my view). But I guess I was just in it for the money.
> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents.
Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.
FWIW I hate huge chunks of the industry + its inhabitants and am somewhat happy that my GPU can replace a significant amount of interactions with it and them.
Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech.
We can be free[1].
__
[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine
> A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI.
I venture to say that this number is small. Most SWEs get into it because they don't view writing code as a "burden".
The people who are "liberated" aren't the SWEs, it's the people higher up the ladder than the SWEs, who can't or don't want to be bothered with coding anymore. For them, managing a fleet of agents is easier than managing a group of SWEs.
Most of the code I was paid to write is a burden. I've spent far more hours writing generic CRUD apps, debugging overly complex javascript tooling (almost always out of date) and other tedious grunt work.
I don't think it's fair to say that all SWEs swing one way or the other. I absolutely love the fact that I will never have to waste time debugging cargo culted, trendy libraries ever again while I am also sad I'll also never to get hand write elegant implementations of interesting problems ever again either (unless for fun).
I would be happy to keep writing code but I'm also happy to be liberated from the type of code I was often paid to write.
Totally, I can't quite imagine an AI automating my use of AI tough, how it would infer what prompt I would use at any given time, the problem space is infinite. Am I adding another *arr app to my stack, are we building a SPA, a home automation plugin, whatever. These are things that I want to do and AI helps with that.
In the corporate setting I think though it won't take a lot of time to reduce the layers and number of people that are required to run a software company. Either one becomes a more general work manager or obsolete I guess.
It is remarkable to me how few people seem to understand it is a much smaller step for AI-generated software to kill the need for companies of idea men than it was for them to kill the need for people writing code.
All of your potential customers are just going to vibecode their own software. In many cases they won't even realize that the software they vibecoded even exists as it will just be an invisible tool the LLM built for itself to reproduce a similar solution to a similar prompt over and over.
Once AI flattens out any company enough, the company itself no longer needs to exist, it can trivially be replaced by the model providers. Companies exist to be collections of skilled people with a common goal. When you don't need that, you don't need companies. The agents can work for your customer instead of you and nothing changes except who gets paid (not you).
There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
> There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them.
I've commented previously that there will be much more political interest in AI causing unemployment when the first CEOs are replaced.
That's going to happen. It's part of the "creative destruction" of capitalism.
If AIs maximize shareholder value better than some CEOs, those CEOs are toast.
They either get replaced in the same organization, or a new company arises and crushes them.
> There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
Because you are singularly right about the issue? Have some intellectual modesty, brother.
I think it's fair to expect tha AI capabilities will more likely end up far over or under that magic threshold than close to it. Given the way that technology develops, it's probably going to be over.
Its nice to know others feel this way. I do feel some kind of despair when I think about the kind of work I used to do even just a year ago compared to now. A coworker of mine took FMLA recently to figure out what they want to do next because they no longer feel even the slightest fulfillment from swe.
Of course this does not undo any grief, dismiss it, or better their situation:
I don't know if it helps, but they should know that for every one of them that experiences this grief, it brings joy to ten other people that are now able to do things (make vibe-coded programs) that used to be out of reach for them.
All this supposed fun, is always something fairly simple that would take maybe a hundred or thousand hours of practice to build, it was never out of reach of them, they just felt they didn’t have the time or motivation to build that skill. (even a 1000 hour project can be done in 6 months outside of work time) Now they don’t need it. If there is any fun in this, it is an extremely shallow, garden variety sort of fun that comes from consuming content. They will never experience the deep fun that comes from being immersed creatively in a project, which I would trade anytime for something shallow.
that probably makes it feel even worse for most people
imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.
It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.
We aren't suddenly seeing 10x the software output that these 10 joyful people are producing. I think it's more likely that 10x people are suddenly trying to figure out a way to low-effort scam money with AI. And a few of those people have teamed up with VC's to make AI products to scrape the bottom of the pond for desperate suckers looking to scam money. There's 10x the headaches for existing projects that suddenly have to deal with low-effort bugreps from people looking to show that they are now "expert software engineers" because they can write "go find the bugs in Project X" and an AI will possibly do that.
There are some interesting things being built by AI, but 10x the number of joyful software engineers ain't it.
Not everyone is going to publish their creations, not everyone is on HN, and not everyone on HN is going to shout from the rooftops about how they are in that larger group of newly-enabled people.
Every new technology is going to also enable bad people, just like the Internet enabled scammers, it enabled a lot more people to be more productive.
The Luddites literally turned to violence when their profession was replaced by better technology. This has been happening for generations to every profession. There is joy in learning new things and developing new skills though.
The “violence” was a simple act of sabotage, nobody got hurt except some peace of machinery and the wallets of the rich exploiters.
Well, that is not entirely true. The British parliament made sabotaging work machinery punishable by death. So people did in fact get hurt, the people who were hurt were the Luddites, and the people hurting them was the British state executing them.
it feels like a transition from artisan level work to factory based industrial manufacturing.
the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process
I imagine it was what it felt like for miners when they went from working next to each other with pickaxes, to operating massive machines by themselves, although that timeline was much longer and less jarring, taking a generation or two.
I am always doing everything alone, so I am liking the LLMs a lot. My own code is very good, but nobody but myself cared about that. Even the one job that I got which allowed me to gather the capital needed to move into trading feels like complete luck. This is a new golden age for entrepreneurs and apocalypse for wage workers. Nobody whose status depends on his own productivity would complain about it going up sharply.
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
I think you’re heavily miscalibrated. Anyone can use LLMs, the floor has risen drastically. What supposed productivity you achieve, every one else can because there’s 0 skill to using LLMs, this is probably a much darker future ahead for you than the rest, you’ll have to keep constantly agent maxing to try and outcompete millions of other humans doing the same.
Anyone can do work on their own car. It's not especially hard.
But a professional working on their own car knows tricks and has tools / ways of working that a regular person doesn't have access to.
You can tell the difference in the result if you know where to look.
Sometimes it matters: the way you change some components matters - and while you're there with half the engine bay cleared, you can fix a few other things that usually fail in this specific model.
Sometimes it doesn't: oil change is hard to fuck up, but not impossible.
The the things I've made with agents aren't hard to do for anyone, but I can claim that I can pick up any of my projects 6 months from now and confidently add features without worrying about stuff breaking or the agent doing crazy crap - because I build the limits into my projects by default.
People are afraid to do work on cars (and mains wiring, and plumbing) because even though the work is relatively simple the consequences for fucking up are so severe (severe damage, injury, death, etc). That's most of the reason they pay someone else to do it.
For the vast majority of software that isn't the case at all.
If not all agents are equal and require calibration, then it seems like people can specialize, so you're only competing with other specialists in that area (and not necessarily trying to out-compete).
LLMs are constantly driving off the cliff. Constantly. They require some actual agency steering the ship.
This idea that there is 0 skill to using them is the opposite: it requires far more skill because the human has to manage the whole building all at once rather than focusing on putting up one beam at a time, one rafter at a time. Your responsibility is totally different. It has to scale far higher!
Many devs have had strong leads that do the ticket work, that figure out what to do. It's unclear what role there is for those folks now.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having a machine that does most of the coding for you means you can have more of the collaborative, human input. You can focus on the UX, you can fix all bugs, you can experiment with new ideas faster than ever. There will be zero excuses for poorly done work - think of all the half-assed corporate apps you have had to use during your career. I think this is the start of a great era in software development.
I am inclined to think this way in a commercial setting, but for open source contributors, where their work was done for the love of coding, I can understand feeling like the end has arrived. In my company, I'm building the mechanics of factory-coding and trying to get the team think in higher-level terms: what needs to be built, what does it need to do when it deploys, and how can we build the factory that gets that done repeatedly? To me, building the factory is an interesting problem and agentic coding does not eliminate the higher-level design that absolutely must be done, all of which is, to me, the interesting part of software dev.
But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.
Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?
Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.
but so many things we have are black boxes now. do people need to understand how cars work to drive them properly?
And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).
The difference is that people who make the cars and the mechanics who repair them still understand how that black box works.
Would you be willing to drive one if the engineers at ford were all fired and an almighty agent who kinda did the almost right thing most of the time was designing the black box?
probably not, but my main gripe would be that there would be no way to punish anyone if something went wrong with the car, not (necessarily) that human judgement or expertise is still needed as part of the car design process.
So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.
The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
> What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
The chilling bit is that the machines are doing just fine on the understanding programs front (up to and including decompiling them from machine code).
One thing that strikes me about what is going on: we have been promised this renaissance in software, yet, it been 2-3y of accelerated agentic/LLM development and I haven't see anything great coming out of the LLM developed software world that is worth looking at. Let's take open source as an example: No new 3d/2d CAD packages that are more capable than Blender/FreeCad/KiCad, nor Blender/FreeCad all of the sudden became much more capable than they were just few years ago. I also want to point out,that I haven't seen any new LLMed software in Electronic/ElectroDynamic simulation, something I would LLM to excel at, beyond what already existed before.
No new software that is equal to Adobe Creative Suite (that Vibed coded replacement is trash IMO), No new Operating Systems that are taking over. No new utilities that are super useful in day work. We are using the same software, we've used before LLM arrived.
Reverse Engineering became much easier, it is plus. Finding vulnerabilities also became much easier, another plus. Models are getting better. But where is the new cool software ?
Edit: I will go even beyond OSS. M$ & Goog, who are DEEPLY Vested into AI, have access to the best possible frontier models and large groups of highly proficient engineers. Yet, Windows and Android are as laggy & buggy, as they were 4-5 years ago.
I personally think the agents and the harnesses themselves are pretty cool software. Claude code, openclaw, hermes, and now the consumer facing ones. I have been doing all kinds of cool things with them. If you gave somebody the claude desktop app with blender mcp 10 years ago their minds would be absolutely blown.
A lot of these harnesses and mcps themselves are built with llms.
One of the things I've started noticing at work is that for the last few months I was banging away at having multiple streams at a time. But over time, I've reached the point where there is some human blocker on the stream, be it QA to test it, other humans to have attention to pick it up for the next step, deployment of some sort, or in some happy cases, it made it through to deployment and the problem is now solved. In the past couple of weeks my multistreaming is toning down and more often I'm back to one stream of work. Often a much higher level stream than I would have been working at a couple of years ago, and I'm moving faster in a number of ways. Some of that "faster" has been burned up in things like changing environments that I previously just wouldn't have done, though.
Open source has had a QA problem pretty much its entire life... not in the sense that it stinks necessarily, but in that getting it at all is a challenge and was in many projects probably already the blocker to further progress.
One wonders if what is happening here is just that even in the software space, where the fluidity and flexibility is maximized as we work with nearly entirely digital constructs, that once we burn through the dry tinder of "all the stuff we know we needed but didn't have the coding time to get to" and the frontier of "work to do" advance on all fronts to "some sort of human or real-world blocker", it may just turn out that the steady state improvement in productivity after accounting for Amdahl's Law, even when code is "nearly free", is only a maybe 2x or 3x improvement after all. If this is true, goodness help the financial bubble which is assuming that something like 5x or 10x indefinitely is a lower bound, if even in the best possible domain for AI that's all we really get.
> No new utilities that are super useful in day work.
thats the renaissance for you - you no longer need the utilities, just ask the agent to do that, whatever it might be.
One thing I always like about coding is that when something is annoying or hard to do, you can improve things so that it becomes easier and more straightforward, at least in principle. For example if a library is badly designed, buggy, or just doesn’t exist, you can write your own. If tooling is bad, you can improve it or create your own tooling. At the extreme, you can create your own programming language, database or operating system. In the small, you can write your own macros and wrapper functions.
With LLMs, that route largely doesn’t exist. Yes, you could write your own harness and agentic tooling. Maybe you could RLHF an existing model. But it all feels less tangible, and you can’t really change the interface to the LLM on the semantic content level in a well-defined way. It’s not malleable in the manner that what you’re coding against is malleable.
>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
This is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
Except the robots actually cost far more than $1/hour, it’s just that the owners have enough capital to operate at a massive loss until the carpenters have largely been replaced. Only then will we learn what the robots actually cost.
Plus robots (software and hardware) will increasingly be used to invade even the most basic privacy, to control people etc. They are not just productivity tools anymore, they are also mass surveillance tools and every bad thing that comes with it.
Self-hosted and/or open models are fast approaching (or have reached) the quality bar necessary to handle a great deal of software development work. The models needed to cause the OP's problem are becoming commoditized.
Unless they manage regulatory capture and with this kind of money at stake I would not bet against that. It's going to get very ugly. Read up on transhumanism to see what the stakes are, they're playing for keeps here.
Regulatory capture - I tried to bring this up in another comment of mine, but not much resonance.
I wondered if many a press article seen in media re security breaches and LLMs based hacks are not in part at least campaigns to legitimize regulation.
How would regulatory capture of LLM realistically look like? Do you have any ideas here?
> How would regulatory capture of LLM realistically look like? Do you have any ideas here?
Let's flip this around. What do you imagine the most likely form that regulatory capture crafted by the major LLM Manufacturers would be?
When rolling this question around in your head, remember that the US Congress gave the telephone companies that blatantly and knowingly violated FISA retroactive immunity for their crimes in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. Congress will move mountains if the majority of its members are scared enough and/or see enough profit in something.
> Read up on transhumanism to see what the stakes are...
Eh. Transhumanism is very good. Every medical intervention that improves or consensually prolongs the life of a human is transhumanist. Our natural state is incredibly godawful. [0] The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.
What the TESCREAL cult is peddling is incredibly bad. They have folks believing that not only are they ushering in the arrival of Robot Jesus, that nearly any terrible thing done now to speed up the project is justifiable because it hastens Robot Jesus's arrival. In actuality, the only thing that's hastened is the accumulation of wealth of awful humans like Altman, Amodei, Huang, and many others.
The core tenant of Rationalism [1] is great. It's just a huge shame that so many of the folks who were attracted to the philosophy ended up being so bad at learning how to do the one thing it tries to get you to do.
[0] Remember that it wasn't that long ago that humans had a 50/50 chance of dying before the age of five!
[1] Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it. You will inevitably fail at this, but that's no reason to stop trying to get better at it.
The difference with those is that they're systems of governance... which means that that must scale if they're to be applied to large groups of people. And -well- they scale very poorly.
I have been told it is the future of sleeping, and if I don‘t sleep with a plastic cover directing the pooping agent I will fall behind and eventually become obsolete. And that sleeping like this will eventually cure cancer and build swarms of mining rigs in space.
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
100%. Although large handwritten software code bases are often indecipherable to the average human being (actually, almost always indecipherable to the average human being, but often indecipherable even to skilled software engineers too); sometimes due to inherent complexities, sometimes due to Enterprise-isms.
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.
sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?
One of the most underrated abilities in this industry is knowing when to walk away from something that no longer bring you joy. It's sad that it has come to this, but I'm sure the OP will find something more fun to do with their time.
I have a strange feeling that we'll see an increasing number of these to the point where we'll start to see legitimate issues in ecosystems as real talent exits (due to projects no longer evolving, being deprecated, etc as a response to AI).
Will be quite funny when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development—despite having AI—because it turns out you actually need talented, creative people to build the building blocks the AI spits out. LLMs can parrot but they're basically the Crazy Town [1] of software development.
Well, people aren’t coding to keep their skills and knowledge fresh.
And they’re not even learning from their AI agents since they’re not closely reviewing the code.
The chance of code quality increasing seems remote.
And that’s not to mention the new generation—having rarely coded enough to properly review code.
Nor to mention the AI learning from AI coded slop: mad cow disease for AI.
What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?
> What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?
That's where we're headed but I'd say the smart teams will have that 'caretaker guy' use judgment to know when and when not to apply AI. That describes one of my businesses perfectly [1].
It's already started imo. Spotify's desktop app on MacOS is becoming unusable (up to ~30s delays after clicking a button before the action runs—used to be snappy). I just saw the Epic Games launcher thing. Anecdotally, countless websites just break at random (more so than even when it was 100% human).
I can't speak to Ruby or other programming languages, but as a creator and occasional hacker with a media background, I have found AI to be incredibly liberating.
Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).
For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw) which I later shared with relatives to proof and enjoy. Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.
The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.
Take woodworking. For some people, the act and meditative work of building it piece by piece is the part that they strive for. For others, it’s the planning phase and the “how will all these pieces go together” phase. For even others, it’s the staining phase. Some people like every part, others like just one part and work through all that extra just to get the chance to do that next part. For some, while they may not enjoy the preface to the work they want, they appreciate it because they feel that blitzing past it cheapens the stage they love.
Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
> Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.
As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.
But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.
I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.
It definitely varies person-by-person. People who enjoyed l33tcoding, the act of programming, and the building process feel one way vs. the people who are in it for the end product, or enjoy the design process feel another. In a way, it's almost like those who enjoy the journey vs. the result (although the design process is also a journey).
Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.
From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).
Edited to add:
Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.
I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.
I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started learning how to build web pages.
I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.
A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.
It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.
I have wondered where we are with stuff like this.
I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.
Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.
As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.
Eventually maintainers will just throw up their hands and leave the repo under the care of a LLM. "Merge PRs that align with the product's vision/design/intention. Meticulously examine for malicious contributions. Email me if there are doubts."
The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
> The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
In some respects maybe in others less so.
So in my situation I am using a client for a system and am using a very specific part of it even though there is a lot of other complicated code in other parts of the client. A LLM is good enough to maintain the code path I am using and of course any changes are triggered / watched over by me. In this situation I am comfortable letting LLMs do most of the code. I would be less enthused if that was outside of my control and the code changes were more often and faster.
yeah maybe. i think it's become a lot more feasible to fork and modify vs wait for new features or fix bugs. the future might be that the main repo for a project forms the "core", and consumers use their own forks which are automatically kept up to date. the core doesn't need to be as configurable or flexible as the forks can add functionality directly. in theory it could be easier for the maintainers.
I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
> I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
I'm working two entry level jobs, and I have spent maybe upwards of 100B tokens in the last year? on a project which isn't more than 250,000 lines of code. I have done countless refactors and care a lot about the craft.
Yes, but it may be hard to justify the "experience of coding" from a commercial standpoint.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.
If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place? I was wondering if we should face an uncomfortable realization: much of what we call being creative was really the cost of overcoming cognitive friction due to the limit of our brains.
Cognitive scientists like Margaret Boden used to break creativity into three different categories: combinatory, exploratory, and transformational. It looks like a lot of our programming tasks are really combinatory and exploratory. Yes, they can be deemed novel and creative by individuals, but collectively they are standardized. It's just like finding integrals used to an art, but nowadays Mathematica can do it better to most of the integrals. Mastering special functions used to be the key to solving tricky PDEs, but nowadays few engineering students need to spend multiple semesters learning them. Quasi-RH was considered a Fields-level hard problem, yet AI could brute-force a proof with elaborate estimates. We humans have a brain that can process only a few variables at a time and it took ingenuity and years of effort to master a series of concepts before using them to solve a problem, but that could be just the cost of knowledge transfer, which AI can drive to zero in many cases.
However, the need for creativity does not go away. It just moves more to the transformational category. In addition, our craft will shift to arguably a less romantic tier: problem formulation, verification, and grounding. It will be a painful transition to many people, me included, but we have no choice but to adapt.
Note I'm not ignoring the economical impact of AI. It's very possible that lowering the cost of producing code increases the aggregate appetite for software, but the demand of software engineers can still go down. Even if total code volume explode tenfold, the labor market may not absorb displaced engineers. I wish there are solutions to this pain, but I fail to see what they are.
> If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place?
Assuming that it can, and it can also do a great number of things that we previously considered creative work, what’s left?
I recently played some music for a friend by an artist I really like (mitch murder), and his comment was that Suno AI could generate plenty more songs along the same lines. Now, I’m not so sure it actually can; I think the human behind the music is bringing something special to it, but this nuance is lost on my friend. Suno AI is good enough for him.
I think the situation with these ruby gems is similar. I, personally, would rather use the human crafted gems, but there are plenty of people like my friend who think there’s either no difference or no important difference between what the creative human made and what the machine can make.
Well, it might be a rational view for the author, but for me that's like saying "I no longer like cooking, because there are companies providing the recipes I like as ready-made meals", or "I no longer play my instruments and make music, because there are machines which can create the music I like"; both topic apply to me personally, and I wouldn't agree to the statements. I still like to design and implement systems, make clever architectures and solve tricky problems. Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?
For most of us, as much as we enjoy making clever things, without the context of a job there aren't that many fun problems we have time to engage with.
It matters because doing so used to be worthwhile economically. Now it is exclusively a part-time for people who have time to do it for fun.
I'm still in business myself and I see the problems. But the article was not about what you suggest. It was about contributing open-source to a community and whether it is still worthwhile and fun, even if some community exponents started to use LLMs.
A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.
What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?
Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.
While the author finds DHH “abhorrent”, I actually find DHH refreshing. He is honest and doesn’t do things just because they will look politically correct. I wish more leaders were as blunt and honest about why they would do/not do something.
This is going to be happening all over the place. I've released some code in the past but I'm definitely not going to do so again without ironclad agreements in place about AI ingestion. I'm not going to help the likes of Amodei and Altman to a further increase in their power, my goal was to help normal people not weird cult-like corporations and I suspect that a lot of people that have released code over the years have the same attitude (though obviously not all of them).
It would not be absurd: Ruby (not Rails, Ruby, I insist) puts very high the "joy of coding", its syntax pleasant to write and read for humans, and its welcoming community. It never was the most performant, it's been a long time since it last was the cool kid on the block, but all those other aspects make it very attractive for very different reasons. That's a big part of why I started writing Ruby a long time ago vs. other languages, and why I enjoyed it so much, and I don't think I'm the only one.
I believe the Ruby community counts many people who resonate with this aspect of the language and of the community. And if you joined and enjoyed Ruby because you love collaborating around elegant code with/for other humans, you're surely not enjoying the current AI trend a lot.
I'm not writing Ruby daily anymore these days, but I still feel this way, and I really do not enjoy my work much these days.
> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now.
Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.
Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?
I really would like to believe that GPL is the answer here but I know it won’t change anything for them. If they can steal and destroy books, nothing will ever stop them.
I know of at least 3 significant rails projects/donors that are actively discussing AI-lead refactors since DHH's talk declaring rails dead. Even if you like the language it's going to be a total mess in a year or two.
I'd rather tell LLM to rewrite project in Python. There is no good reason to use Ruby/Rails now, the community and job market is shrinking and the language is nothing special.
Ruby is definitely not bringing me joy since I have to see needlessly depressing articles like this. Rails did not bring me joy 12 years ago when I needed to update dependencies for a legacy cloud service we relied on. Ruby's middling syntax didn't bring me joy either, despite the hype of the time. My child named our cat Ruby, and I had to explain to fellow nerds that it wasn't inspired by the language.
The robots aren't as good as you think. Its just that we're sceamed at all fay by hoardes of people saying they are.
Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...
You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.
People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.
But the robots are mostly "fine", and "fine" is good enough for most things we get paid for: enterprise SaaS products, mobile apps, etc.
I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.
I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.
"But even beyond Rails, the Ruby language itself is now substantially developed using LLM agents. Matz is giving talks repositioning Ruby as a “Programming Language for AI age”, to be emitted by LLM agents, and stating that to be able to do that LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here."
Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.
Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.
I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.
Seems unnecessarily harsh. LLMs are a power tool. I'm not on-board with how it's being used in a lot of places, once things shake out I believe it's going to be net positive.
At some point in your life you may wonder why you're angry and miserable. Creating burner accounts to call people names should be high on your list of choices to introspect.
He started being ambivalent about it maybe two years ago, and reached metastasis in the latest Rails World fiasco, with dhh telling him to his face that his life's work (Matz's terms) is irrelevant now.
whatever... i guess pissed in his cheerios this morning and he decided to rage quit. trust me, you won't be missed. That's the best thing about LLMs and agents coding now... you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on. If you need it, you can create it or update it yourself now.
These developers whom have this God complex are going to find out they were Gods in their own minds real quickly.
> you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on
Is this really the way you look at open-source libraries that are given to you for free, i.e. as a gift? I hope you look differently at gifts people give you in real life.
I wrote open source libraries and frameworks for years. some successful, some not. I never bitched about it, I did it to give back and because I loved it.
I stand by what I said and the point wasn't missed. You can still program by hand if you want. This dude is just embarrassing himself by crying that he is no longer relevant since agents can do the work now.
while I appreciate the authors contributions to the ecosystem, I dont recommend anyone throw a tantrum on their way out the door. So you disagree with DHH (On what? Just everything I guess? No discussion worth having at all?) and you disagree with Matz (we're supposed to intuit what the 'problem' is; I'm assuming that he uses LLMs?).
Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.
This is an overreaction. Yes, with AI we can all write our own features and bug fixes for open source, but there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
> there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.
I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future
I'm not really advocating for any position here - just pointing out that open-source maintainer was a thankless role before LLMs, and it's only become worse since.
a LOT of these arguments against New Thing seem to always fall into the category of "I no longer receive social credit for being a productive member of a niche in-group, so I quit.", masked as "They peed in the pool!".
The pool they're talking about isn't software or CS, it's the attached treadmill that provides social kudos and credit for a job well done.
This whole thing has been a huge revelation for me in that I naively presumed at first that other 'computer people' were also in it for the passion and interest in the hobby, now I am realizing quicker and quicker that "it's just a job" for the majority of people I talk to, the rest of the people do it "for exposure" , which is a nice way of saying that they're playing the Facebook/MySpace social kudos game with their linkedins and github profiles and blog articles.
very few Terry style "just passionate about the thing" people out there, and I had never realized how rare that was.
The social aspect of a craft is more than just "clout" or "smart creds" from an in-group, it is also collaboration, commentary, discussion, and the joy of helping others find their feet, for example. LLM-centric programming takes away not just the "clout" part but also all the other less egocentric social aspects of programming as a hobby. If the hobby's ecosystem gets whittled down to posting a finished demo and saying "look at what Claude did," well, what is there to talk about, really? The whole "process" aspect of the hobby gets obliterated, or at least effectively ceases to exist as a social phenomenon.
I was chatting with a friend who commits on a very well known open source project (~80K stars). He is disillusioned not because the robots aren't good at what they do -- they totally are. The sad thing is that he enjoyed writing code and working with the community on improvements because it was a very human, collaborative thing to do. So, while the robots are great at pushing the project forward even faster and doing fantastic things for security and performance, the joy is gone.
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this. I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't alone in that feeling.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.
I have very mixed feelings.
- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow
- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy
- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).
- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.
- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us
Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.
However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.
Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.
Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.
This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.> not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities.
Those are the parts the LLM is bad at. The 1% of stuff that was interesting was worth looking forward to.
I’m unconvinced about architecture mattering much. I used to think that, but these days I’m leaning towards it being the product of a problem we don’t have anymore. Architecture used to be dangerous and time-consuming to redo. If an AI can do that safely for $100 or $1000 in tokens (one day), that ROI is maybe negative
I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.
> Everyone in SWE is experiencing this.
Obviously this is not true for every SWE. A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI. I see people that struggle because they've identified with the writing code part a lot and that's gone now that the machine is doing it, I bet that's hard.
Yes. The people that didn't enjoy coding say that.
AI is great enabler for stuff that you don't want to be good at, it cut a ton of chore type jobs out of my workflow, but for stuff you do want to get better and care for, it's both joy killer, and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.
I enjoy coding deeply, and my feelings are not that simple.
I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.
I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.
Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.
As I like to tell others: before my job was 70% architecture & patterns and 30% coding & algorithms. Now my job is 100% architecture & patterns. While I still spend the majority of my time on architecture & patterns, and while I enjoy this aspect more than coding and algorithms, I am still working a "different job" than I was when my hands steered the code completely.
People say stuff like this all the time, but what does it actually mean? Like, isn’t the details of the code, at least at some level, part of the “architecture”? I’m so curious about what people who say this are actually making where they just sit around all day and dream up new lego structures without ever having to look at any of the bricks.
Username checks out and thank you for writing out my own feelings better than I ever could have, even with AI.
There are many of us who enjoyed coding, and who enjoy the new paradigm, too.
That's a very simplistic view. I'm very good at writing tests and I'm happy to offload writing tests to LLMs, as long as they follow the structure I've provided.
You're saying that I must not be good in writing tests, irregardless on how I feel about test writing.
People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of them were in technology. I hope agents quickly become good enough to completely commoditize any supposed function they perform, and forces them to leave this industry.
This is an extremely “all or nothing” take. I love computers and started programming in elementary school. I am having more fun now building software than I can remember.
I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.
But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.
I’m glad you mentioned flow state because that’s exactly the high I’m trying to chase with AI and why I like it despite programming since elementary school as well.
I realized I most enjoy higher level problem solving but don’t really enjoy implementation. Like I enjoy algorithms, data structures, memory allocation strategies, SIMD optimization, etc. But writing the code, and debugging it is tedious and takes me out of flow.
And if I’m really interested in the project itself then the algorithms take a back seat and I enjoy the even higher level problem solving of building a cool project.
I don’t think it makes you lesser to enjoy these things more than literally banging out code, and hunting down bugs. Perhaps I’ve written enough code that I don’t find the same joy in that. Who knows.
That's reductive.
I love writing code, but I don't love every single part of writing code. In particular, I really disliked getting stuck on some irrelevant detail, some mysterious error that had nothing to do with my code (dep issues, OS quirks, silent changes, auth failures, researching alternatives), and spinning my tires, unable to work on what I wanted to accomplish. Often I never made it through the far side; I've got a project directory littered with half-finished projects.
Having an AI to figure all that junk out for me so I can focus on the thing I want to build is fantastic. I worry about losing the grip I still have, but for now I've lost some things I loved (a lot of actual code-writing, solving nice straightforward problems), but gained what might as well be superpowers to help with some real shortcomings I had. It's been a net-positive trade for me so far.
And none of my personal projects have made me rich yet...
You can love technology and still have thought that coding was a required path to get to technology and not the ends unto itself.
If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.
It’s not the act of coding, you have to really hate problem solving, to love managing agents. Such people are only in it for the money, it may sound disparaging but it’s just true.
If tech paid less, say minimum wage, they would all leave and none of them would ever tinker around anything in their free time. I’m not depressed, I’m just disappointed by how many folks are like that in this industry I loved.
There are infinite problems and agents help us solve problems faster. Sure they're not coding puzzles, they're actual problems actual human beings have, but they're still problems. Id way rather help a school district track its roster properly than argue with eslint. I'd rather get a rocket to the moon than triage garbage collection quirks too.
You're certainly welcome to miss what coding was, but being rude to engineers who are trying to build businesses is just as ridiculous and entitled as this article is.
If agent did all the technical work of sending a rocket to the moon, and all that was left for me was deciding whether a rocket to the moon should be built or one to mars, which is better for our “customers” and I actually enjoyed that then I would be honest and say I was never into technology, which is completely fine, majority of humanity isn’t into it.
I don’t need to see why you feel the desperate need to larp as a technologist when you’re happy with letting an agent solve all the technical problems.
You only think it is rude because you have tied your identity to being a technologist when you are not, I’m just saying it like it is.
> I don’t need to see why you feel the desperate need to larp as a technologist when you’re happy with letting an agent solve all the technical problems.
This is a false comparison. Agents cannot solve all the technical problems, so the entire statement falls apart.
> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents
In other words, people who just wanted to become managers.
Why did you expand it from what he said? I love technology, I enjoy being able to solve problems with technology and coding. I've always felt neutral about the actual act of coding, it was always just a means to the end and now I love that I can do more problem solving in less time and with less toil (from my view). But I guess I was just in it for the money.
> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents.
Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.
FWIW I hate huge chunks of the industry + its inhabitants and am somewhat happy that my GPU can replace a significant amount of interactions with it and them.
Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech. We can be free[1].
__
[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine
> A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI.
I venture to say that this number is small. Most SWEs get into it because they don't view writing code as a "burden".
The people who are "liberated" aren't the SWEs, it's the people higher up the ladder than the SWEs, who can't or don't want to be bothered with coding anymore. For them, managing a fleet of agents is easier than managing a group of SWEs.
Most of the code I was paid to write is a burden. I've spent far more hours writing generic CRUD apps, debugging overly complex javascript tooling (almost always out of date) and other tedious grunt work.
I don't think it's fair to say that all SWEs swing one way or the other. I absolutely love the fact that I will never have to waste time debugging cargo culted, trendy libraries ever again while I am also sad I'll also never to get hand write elegant implementations of interesting problems ever again either (unless for fun).
I would be happy to keep writing code but I'm also happy to be liberated from the type of code I was often paid to write.
People hate generalizations
Generally, people hate generalizations
Some people sometimes hate some generalizations.
Soon enough the clankers will automate that part too. I'm eager to see how "liberated" those people are going to feel then.
Totally, I can't quite imagine an AI automating my use of AI tough, how it would infer what prompt I would use at any given time, the problem space is infinite. Am I adding another *arr app to my stack, are we building a SPA, a home automation plugin, whatever. These are things that I want to do and AI helps with that.
In the corporate setting I think though it won't take a lot of time to reduce the layers and number of people that are required to run a software company. Either one becomes a more general work manager or obsolete I guess.
It is remarkable to me how few people seem to understand it is a much smaller step for AI-generated software to kill the need for companies of idea men than it was for them to kill the need for people writing code.
All of your potential customers are just going to vibecode their own software. In many cases they won't even realize that the software they vibecoded even exists as it will just be an invisible tool the LLM built for itself to reproduce a similar solution to a similar prompt over and over.
Once AI flattens out any company enough, the company itself no longer needs to exist, it can trivially be replaced by the model providers. Companies exist to be collections of skilled people with a common goal. When you don't need that, you don't need companies. The agents can work for your customer instead of you and nothing changes except who gets paid (not you).
There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
> There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them.
I've commented previously that there will be much more political interest in AI causing unemployment when the first CEOs are replaced.
That's going to happen. It's part of the "creative destruction" of capitalism. If AIs maximize shareholder value better than some CEOs, those CEOs are toast. They either get replaced in the same organization, or a new company arises and crushes them.
> There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
Because you are singularly right about the issue? Have some intellectual modesty, brother.
I think it's fair to expect tha AI capabilities will more likely end up far over or under that magic threshold than close to it. Given the way that technology develops, it's probably going to be over.
Its nice to know others feel this way. I do feel some kind of despair when I think about the kind of work I used to do even just a year ago compared to now. A coworker of mine took FMLA recently to figure out what they want to do next because they no longer feel even the slightest fulfillment from swe.
Of course this does not undo any grief, dismiss it, or better their situation:
I don't know if it helps, but they should know that for every one of them that experiences this grief, it brings joy to ten other people that are now able to do things (make vibe-coded programs) that used to be out of reach for them.
All this supposed fun, is always something fairly simple that would take maybe a hundred or thousand hours of practice to build, it was never out of reach of them, they just felt they didn’t have the time or motivation to build that skill. (even a 1000 hour project can be done in 6 months outside of work time) Now they don’t need it. If there is any fun in this, it is an extremely shallow, garden variety sort of fun that comes from consuming content. They will never experience the deep fun that comes from being immersed creatively in a project, which I would trade anytime for something shallow.
I don't think your expectation is reasonable for the majority.
The majority likes watching slop all day and rot to death. Their tyranny is not something that should be celebrated like your original comment.
Uh...
Edit: I'm at a loss for words.
that probably makes it feel even worse for most people
imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.
It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.
This comment is the "Eat your broccoli because there are starving kids in China" of SWE.
No, that's not quite the same.
We aren't suddenly seeing 10x the software output that these 10 joyful people are producing. I think it's more likely that 10x people are suddenly trying to figure out a way to low-effort scam money with AI. And a few of those people have teamed up with VC's to make AI products to scrape the bottom of the pond for desperate suckers looking to scam money. There's 10x the headaches for existing projects that suddenly have to deal with low-effort bugreps from people looking to show that they are now "expert software engineers" because they can write "go find the bugs in Project X" and an AI will possibly do that.
There are some interesting things being built by AI, but 10x the number of joyful software engineers ain't it.
Not everyone is going to publish their creations, not everyone is on HN, and not everyone on HN is going to shout from the rooftops about how they are in that larger group of newly-enabled people.
Every new technology is going to also enable bad people, just like the Internet enabled scammers, it enabled a lot more people to be more productive.
Not everyone. I’ve been a solo entrepreneur since 2015. Developing stuff now feels like I can unwrap a present every day.
I never cared about the social aspects of it other than releasing the odd plugin I developed.
My social life is entirely offline.
The Luddites literally turned to violence when their profession was replaced by better technology. This has been happening for generations to every profession. There is joy in learning new things and developing new skills though.
The “violence” was a simple act of sabotage, nobody got hurt except some peace of machinery and the wallets of the rich exploiters.
Well, that is not entirely true. The British parliament made sabotaging work machinery punishable by death. So people did in fact get hurt, the people who were hurt were the Luddites, and the people hurting them was the British state executing them.
The Luddites only wanted to keep their jobs.
> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.
Speak for yourself.
it feels like a transition from artisan level work to factory based industrial manufacturing.
the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process
I imagine it was what it felt like for miners when they went from working next to each other with pickaxes, to operating massive machines by themselves, although that timeline was much longer and less jarring, taking a generation or two.
Except no miners went down the mine after their day job to work for free and for fun
Eh, maybe the geologists did.
I am always doing everything alone, so I am liking the LLMs a lot. My own code is very good, but nobody but myself cared about that. Even the one job that I got which allowed me to gather the capital needed to move into trading feels like complete luck. This is a new golden age for entrepreneurs and apocalypse for wage workers. Nobody whose status depends on his own productivity would complain about it going up sharply.
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
I think you’re heavily miscalibrated. Anyone can use LLMs, the floor has risen drastically. What supposed productivity you achieve, every one else can because there’s 0 skill to using LLMs, this is probably a much darker future ahead for you than the rest, you’ll have to keep constantly agent maxing to try and outcompete millions of other humans doing the same.
Analogy time!
Anyone can do work on their own car. It's not especially hard.
But a professional working on their own car knows tricks and has tools / ways of working that a regular person doesn't have access to.
You can tell the difference in the result if you know where to look.
Sometimes it matters: the way you change some components matters - and while you're there with half the engine bay cleared, you can fix a few other things that usually fail in this specific model.
Sometimes it doesn't: oil change is hard to fuck up, but not impossible.
The the things I've made with agents aren't hard to do for anyone, but I can claim that I can pick up any of my projects 6 months from now and confidently add features without worrying about stuff breaking or the agent doing crazy crap - because I build the limits into my projects by default.
!RemindMe 6 months
People are afraid to do work on cars (and mains wiring, and plumbing) because even though the work is relatively simple the consequences for fucking up are so severe (severe damage, injury, death, etc). That's most of the reason they pay someone else to do it.
For the vast majority of software that isn't the case at all.
> agent maxing
If not all agents are equal and require calibration, then it seems like people can specialize, so you're only competing with other specialists in that area (and not necessarily trying to out-compete).
LLMs are constantly driving off the cliff. Constantly. They require some actual agency steering the ship.
This idea that there is 0 skill to using them is the opposite: it requires far more skill because the human has to manage the whole building all at once rather than focusing on putting up one beam at a time, one rafter at a time. Your responsibility is totally different. It has to scale far higher!
Many devs have had strong leads that do the ticket work, that figure out what to do. It's unclear what role there is for those folks now.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having a machine that does most of the coding for you means you can have more of the collaborative, human input. You can focus on the UX, you can fix all bugs, you can experiment with new ideas faster than ever. There will be zero excuses for poorly done work - think of all the half-assed corporate apps you have had to use during your career. I think this is the start of a great era in software development.
I am inclined to think this way in a commercial setting, but for open source contributors, where their work was done for the love of coding, I can understand feeling like the end has arrived. In my company, I'm building the mechanics of factory-coding and trying to get the team think in higher-level terms: what needs to be built, what does it need to do when it deploys, and how can we build the factory that gets that done repeatedly? To me, building the factory is an interesting problem and agentic coding does not eliminate the higher-level design that absolutely must be done, all of which is, to me, the interesting part of software dev.
But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.
And when before iterating on a stupid web page layout might've taken weeks of back and forth - now it can be done during a single meeting.
Or during a sales meeting, an experienced engineer can have a quick prototype done to show the client.
You have to wonder if this site will go next.
Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?
Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.
but so many things we have are black boxes now. do people need to understand how cars work to drive them properly?
And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).
The difference is that people who make the cars and the mechanics who repair them still understand how that black box works.
Would you be willing to drive one if the engineers at ford were all fired and an almighty agent who kinda did the almost right thing most of the time was designing the black box?
probably not, but my main gripe would be that there would be no way to punish anyone if something went wrong with the car, not (necessarily) that human judgement or expertise is still needed as part of the car design process.
So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.
A more apt analogy would be if self-driving cars fully take over, such that most people don't even know how to drive, let alone how an engine works.
Instead of driving you're telling a piece of nondeterministic software where you'd like to go and then watching the result as a passenger.
That's the way the world's been since the integrated circuit was first developed, for better or worse.
No, it's not.
The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
> What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
The chilling bit is that the machines are doing just fine on the understanding programs front (up to and including decompiling them from machine code).
> Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?
For me it's about losing much of the entire career, because companies will come to expect AI-level work that I can't/won't provide.
> Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
IMO This assumes that one views programming as more than just a job/career, but not everyone does so.
> Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control.
For some, this is actually relieving. Sometimes we want to be more ignorant, sometimes it makes us happier.
How is that being disillusioned?
One thing that strikes me about what is going on: we have been promised this renaissance in software, yet, it been 2-3y of accelerated agentic/LLM development and I haven't see anything great coming out of the LLM developed software world that is worth looking at. Let's take open source as an example: No new 3d/2d CAD packages that are more capable than Blender/FreeCad/KiCad, nor Blender/FreeCad all of the sudden became much more capable than they were just few years ago. I also want to point out,that I haven't seen any new LLMed software in Electronic/ElectroDynamic simulation, something I would LLM to excel at, beyond what already existed before. No new software that is equal to Adobe Creative Suite (that Vibed coded replacement is trash IMO), No new Operating Systems that are taking over. No new utilities that are super useful in day work. We are using the same software, we've used before LLM arrived.
Reverse Engineering became much easier, it is plus. Finding vulnerabilities also became much easier, another plus. Models are getting better. But where is the new cool software ?
Edit: I will go even beyond OSS. M$ & Goog, who are DEEPLY Vested into AI, have access to the best possible frontier models and large groups of highly proficient engineers. Yet, Windows and Android are as laggy & buggy, as they were 4-5 years ago.
[delayed]
I personally think the agents and the harnesses themselves are pretty cool software. Claude code, openclaw, hermes, and now the consumer facing ones. I have been doing all kinds of cool things with them. If you gave somebody the claude desktop app with blender mcp 10 years ago their minds would be absolutely blown.
A lot of these harnesses and mcps themselves are built with llms.
One of the things I've started noticing at work is that for the last few months I was banging away at having multiple streams at a time. But over time, I've reached the point where there is some human blocker on the stream, be it QA to test it, other humans to have attention to pick it up for the next step, deployment of some sort, or in some happy cases, it made it through to deployment and the problem is now solved. In the past couple of weeks my multistreaming is toning down and more often I'm back to one stream of work. Often a much higher level stream than I would have been working at a couple of years ago, and I'm moving faster in a number of ways. Some of that "faster" has been burned up in things like changing environments that I previously just wouldn't have done, though.
Open source has had a QA problem pretty much its entire life... not in the sense that it stinks necessarily, but in that getting it at all is a challenge and was in many projects probably already the blocker to further progress.
One wonders if what is happening here is just that even in the software space, where the fluidity and flexibility is maximized as we work with nearly entirely digital constructs, that once we burn through the dry tinder of "all the stuff we know we needed but didn't have the coding time to get to" and the frontier of "work to do" advance on all fronts to "some sort of human or real-world blocker", it may just turn out that the steady state improvement in productivity after accounting for Amdahl's Law, even when code is "nearly free", is only a maybe 2x or 3x improvement after all. If this is true, goodness help the financial bubble which is assuming that something like 5x or 10x indefinitely is a lower bound, if even in the best possible domain for AI that's all we really get.
> No new utilities that are super useful in day work. thats the renaissance for you - you no longer need the utilities, just ask the agent to do that, whatever it might be.
Of course you need utilities, and the AIs do too. Compare:
"ChatGPT, list the files in this directory. use ls"
vs
"ChatGPT, list the files in this directory. no utility exists but here's a hexdump of the hard drive"
the AI might muddle through with option #2, but #1 is way more efficient
This is the great paradox that many people have observed: why are we still using frustrating, buggy, hard-to-use, expensive software all day?
Because LLMs aren't good enough yet to qualify as enterprise support.
One thing I always like about coding is that when something is annoying or hard to do, you can improve things so that it becomes easier and more straightforward, at least in principle. For example if a library is badly designed, buggy, or just doesn’t exist, you can write your own. If tooling is bad, you can improve it or create your own tooling. At the extreme, you can create your own programming language, database or operating system. In the small, you can write your own macros and wrapper functions.
With LLMs, that route largely doesn’t exist. Yes, you could write your own harness and agentic tooling. Maybe you could RLHF an existing model. But it all feels less tangible, and you can’t really change the interface to the LLM on the semantic content level in a well-defined way. It’s not malleable in the manner that what you’re coding against is malleable.
What a great phrase!
>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
This is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
Except the robots actually cost far more than $1/hour, it’s just that the owners have enough capital to operate at a massive loss until the carpenters have largely been replaced. Only then will we learn what the robots actually cost.
Plus robots (software and hardware) will increasingly be used to invade even the most basic privacy, to control people etc. They are not just productivity tools anymore, they are also mass surveillance tools and every bad thing that comes with it.
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ca7ufSI1Qxg&ra=m
Most depressing part is humans are training robots to replace themselves
Self-hosted and/or open models are fast approaching (or have reached) the quality bar necessary to handle a great deal of software development work. The models needed to cause the OP's problem are becoming commoditized.
Good luck with the eventual rugpull. It always happens.
(1) We help you
(2) We undercut you
(3) You go out of business
(4) Your buddies go out of business as well
(5) Prices start rising
Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.
The difference is the open and self-hosted models are not far behind the closed models. You can't rugpull if you don't own the rug.
Unless they manage regulatory capture and with this kind of money at stake I would not bet against that. It's going to get very ugly. Read up on transhumanism to see what the stakes are, they're playing for keeps here.
Regulatory capture - I tried to bring this up in another comment of mine, but not much resonance.
I wondered if many a press article seen in media re security breaches and LLMs based hacks are not in part at least campaigns to legitimize regulation.
How would regulatory capture of LLM realistically look like? Do you have any ideas here?
Like this:
https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/19/us-bans-deepseek-federal-ag...
And when it starts, it looks a lot like this:
<https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/media/letters/moolena...>
> How would regulatory capture of LLM realistically look like? Do you have any ideas here?
Let's flip this around. What do you imagine the most likely form that regulatory capture crafted by the major LLM Manufacturers would be?
When rolling this question around in your head, remember that the US Congress gave the telephone companies that blatantly and knowingly violated FISA retroactive immunity for their crimes in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. Congress will move mountains if the majority of its members are scared enough and/or see enough profit in something.
> Read up on transhumanism to see what the stakes are...
Eh. Transhumanism is very good. Every medical intervention that improves or consensually prolongs the life of a human is transhumanist. Our natural state is incredibly godawful. [0] The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.
What the TESCREAL cult is peddling is incredibly bad. They have folks believing that not only are they ushering in the arrival of Robot Jesus, that nearly any terrible thing done now to speed up the project is justifiable because it hastens Robot Jesus's arrival. In actuality, the only thing that's hastened is the accumulation of wealth of awful humans like Altman, Amodei, Huang, and many others.
The core tenant of Rationalism [1] is great. It's just a huge shame that so many of the folks who were attracted to the philosophy ended up being so bad at learning how to do the one thing it tries to get you to do.
[0] Remember that it wasn't that long ago that humans had a 50/50 chance of dying before the age of five!
[1] Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it. You will inevitably fail at this, but that's no reason to stop trying to get better at it.
Yes, and communism is great too [1].
[1] in theory.
And anarchy, yeah.
The difference with those is that they're systems of governance... which means that that must scale if they're to be applied to large groups of people. And -well- they scale very poorly.
The trick to sleeping in a shit-covered bed is to slap a big sheet of plastic on it and never look under it.
The Claude Code development team has pioneered that new way of sleeping.
I have been told that it keeps you warm and adapts to your body's shape for increased comfort.
Still have to deal with the stench. But nothing a nose clip can't solve, I reckon?
"shit fast and break things!"
Shit fast and soil things.
I have been told it is the future of sleeping, and if I don‘t sleep with a plastic cover directing the pooping agent I will fall behind and eventually become obsolete. And that sleeping like this will eventually cure cancer and build swarms of mining rigs in space.
Quite profound.
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
100%. Although large handwritten software code bases are often indecipherable to the average human being (actually, almost always indecipherable to the average human being, but often indecipherable even to skilled software engineers too); sometimes due to inherent complexities, sometimes due to Enterprise-isms.
Let's be honest though, maybe "in the same way it's no longer feasible for tailors to spin their own yarn and weave their own cloth".
i'm sick of scatological metaphor.
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.
sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?
No, not really.
Doesn't that imply that there's nothing inherently wrong about shitting in someone's bed and then sleeping in it?
What kind of autism is it that makes someone dig into the specific technical implications of a joke about sleeping in a bed someone took a shit in?
I thought Rich Hickey's sand cookie analogy was more apt than this bed shitting one.
They mean it's technically possible, but you wouldn't want to.
Society is pretty tolerant about this though?
Who is anyone to judge another person's kinks?
Only if you're into vibe coding.
One of the most underrated abilities in this industry is knowing when to walk away from something that no longer bring you joy. It's sad that it has come to this, but I'm sure the OP will find something more fun to do with their time.
I'd say just knowing when to walk away in anything, not just this industry, is one of the best skills you can have as a human.
In general, figuring out what you want and working towards that is much harder than people realize.
I have a strange feeling that we'll see an increasing number of these to the point where we'll start to see legitimate issues in ecosystems as real talent exits (due to projects no longer evolving, being deprecated, etc as a response to AI).
Will be quite funny when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development—despite having AI—because it turns out you actually need talented, creative people to build the building blocks the AI spits out. LLMs can parrot but they're basically the Crazy Town [1] of software development.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6xffJn4-w
Well, people aren’t coding to keep their skills and knowledge fresh.
And they’re not even learning from their AI agents since they’re not closely reviewing the code.
The chance of code quality increasing seems remote.
And that’s not to mention the new generation—having rarely coded enough to properly review code.
Nor to mention the AI learning from AI coded slop: mad cow disease for AI.
What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?
> What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?
That's where we're headed but I'd say the smart teams will have that 'caretaker guy' use judgment to know when and when not to apply AI. That describes one of my businesses perfectly [1].
[1] https://lattice.engineering
> when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development
When?
It's already started imo. Spotify's desktop app on MacOS is becoming unusable (up to ~30s delays after clicking a button before the action runs—used to be snappy). I just saw the Epic Games launcher thing. Anecdotally, countless websites just break at random (more so than even when it was 100% human).
I can't speak to Ruby or other programming languages, but as a creator and occasional hacker with a media background, I have found AI to be incredibly liberating.
Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).
For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw) which I later shared with relatives to proof and enjoy. Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.
The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.
There’s lots of ways to find joy in things.
Take woodworking. For some people, the act and meditative work of building it piece by piece is the part that they strive for. For others, it’s the planning phase and the “how will all these pieces go together” phase. For even others, it’s the staining phase. Some people like every part, others like just one part and work through all that extra just to get the chance to do that next part. For some, while they may not enjoy the preface to the work they want, they appreciate it because they feel that blitzing past it cheapens the stage they love.
Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
> Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.
As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.
But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.
I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.
I notice you did not write the sanding phase - because no one likes that part.
Thank you for this comment.
It definitely varies person-by-person. People who enjoyed l33tcoding, the act of programming, and the building process feel one way vs. the people who are in it for the end product, or enjoy the design process feel another. In a way, it's almost like those who enjoy the journey vs. the result (although the design process is also a journey).
Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.
From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).
Edited to add: Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.
I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.
This hits too close to home.
I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started learning how to build web pages.
I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.
A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.
It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.
I have wondered where we are with stuff like this.
I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.
Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.
As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.
Eventually maintainers will just throw up their hands and leave the repo under the care of a LLM. "Merge PRs that align with the product's vision/design/intention. Meticulously examine for malicious contributions. Email me if there are doubts."
The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
> The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
In some respects maybe in others less so.
So in my situation I am using a client for a system and am using a very specific part of it even though there is a lot of other complicated code in other parts of the client. A LLM is good enough to maintain the code path I am using and of course any changes are triggered / watched over by me. In this situation I am comfortable letting LLMs do most of the code. I would be less enthused if that was outside of my control and the code changes were more often and faster.
yeah maybe. i think it's become a lot more feasible to fork and modify vs wait for new features or fix bugs. the future might be that the main repo for a project forms the "core", and consumers use their own forks which are automatically kept up to date. the core doesn't need to be as configurable or flexible as the forks can add functionality directly. in theory it could be easier for the maintainers.
> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now. I’m out.
Totally fair. The source code is open. Thanks for all the fish.
I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
> I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
Yes, but only if you're very wealthy.
As always, everyone else can suck it.
I'm working two entry level jobs, and I have spent maybe upwards of 100B tokens in the last year? on a project which isn't more than 250,000 lines of code. I have done countless refactors and care a lot about the craft.
Yes, but it may be hard to justify the "experience of coding" from a commercial standpoint.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.
You can have both, but there are very few people who care about it purely as a craft. They want pay, recognition, etc along with it.
If the client cares for your craftsmanship.
As a hobby you can’t live from
Yes, choose both or choose one of them and, for god's sake, STFU and make something!
If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place? I was wondering if we should face an uncomfortable realization: much of what we call being creative was really the cost of overcoming cognitive friction due to the limit of our brains.
Cognitive scientists like Margaret Boden used to break creativity into three different categories: combinatory, exploratory, and transformational. It looks like a lot of our programming tasks are really combinatory and exploratory. Yes, they can be deemed novel and creative by individuals, but collectively they are standardized. It's just like finding integrals used to an art, but nowadays Mathematica can do it better to most of the integrals. Mastering special functions used to be the key to solving tricky PDEs, but nowadays few engineering students need to spend multiple semesters learning them. Quasi-RH was considered a Fields-level hard problem, yet AI could brute-force a proof with elaborate estimates. We humans have a brain that can process only a few variables at a time and it took ingenuity and years of effort to master a series of concepts before using them to solve a problem, but that could be just the cost of knowledge transfer, which AI can drive to zero in many cases.
However, the need for creativity does not go away. It just moves more to the transformational category. In addition, our craft will shift to arguably a less romantic tier: problem formulation, verification, and grounding. It will be a painful transition to many people, me included, but we have no choice but to adapt.
Note I'm not ignoring the economical impact of AI. It's very possible that lowering the cost of producing code increases the aggregate appetite for software, but the demand of software engineers can still go down. Even if total code volume explode tenfold, the labor market may not absorb displaced engineers. I wish there are solutions to this pain, but I fail to see what they are.
> If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place?
Assuming that it can, and it can also do a great number of things that we previously considered creative work, what’s left?
I recently played some music for a friend by an artist I really like (mitch murder), and his comment was that Suno AI could generate plenty more songs along the same lines. Now, I’m not so sure it actually can; I think the human behind the music is bringing something special to it, but this nuance is lost on my friend. Suno AI is good enough for him.
I think the situation with these ruby gems is similar. I, personally, would rather use the human crafted gems, but there are plenty of people like my friend who think there’s either no difference or no important difference between what the creative human made and what the machine can make.
Yes. being good enough alone can destroy lots of job opportunities, unfortunately.
Ruby is still fun to write, in fact I make the LLMs write the underlying libraries in Rust while I enjoy writing Ruby on top. win win
Well, it might be a rational view for the author, but for me that's like saying "I no longer like cooking, because there are companies providing the recipes I like as ready-made meals", or "I no longer play my instruments and make music, because there are machines which can create the music I like"; both topic apply to me personally, and I wouldn't agree to the statements. I still like to design and implement systems, make clever architectures and solve tricky problems. Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?
For most of us, as much as we enjoy making clever things, without the context of a job there aren't that many fun problems we have time to engage with.
It matters because doing so used to be worthwhile economically. Now it is exclusively a part-time for people who have time to do it for fun.
I'm still in business myself and I see the problems. But the article was not about what you suggest. It was about contributing open-source to a community and whether it is still worthwhile and fun, even if some community exponents started to use LLMs.
That's a real issue in my opinion.
A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.
What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?
Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.
Parasites that kill the host are bad parasites.
What a man child.
> LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here.
You might already have _been_ the problem here.
Fixed that typo ;)
While the author finds DHH “abhorrent”, I actually find DHH refreshing. He is honest and doesn’t do things just because they will look politically correct. I wish more leaders were as blunt and honest about why they would do/not do something.
This is going to be happening all over the place. I've released some code in the past but I'm definitely not going to do so again without ironclad agreements in place about AI ingestion. I'm not going to help the likes of Amodei and Altman to a further increase in their power, my goal was to help normal people not weird cult-like corporations and I suspect that a lot of people that have released code over the years have the same attitude (though obviously not all of them).
Is it me or do most of these "I'm quitting programming" posts seem to be coming from the Ruby community?
It would not be absurd: Ruby (not Rails, Ruby, I insist) puts very high the "joy of coding", its syntax pleasant to write and read for humans, and its welcoming community. It never was the most performant, it's been a long time since it last was the cool kid on the block, but all those other aspects make it very attractive for very different reasons. That's a big part of why I started writing Ruby a long time ago vs. other languages, and why I enjoyed it so much, and I don't think I'm the only one.
I believe the Ruby community counts many people who resonate with this aspect of the language and of the community. And if you joined and enjoyed Ruby because you love collaborating around elegant code with/for other humans, you're surely not enjoying the current AI trend a lot.
I'm not writing Ruby daily anymore these days, but I still feel this way, and I really do not enjoy my work much these days.
i saw those dollar signs and @ symbols in 2003 and ran screaming, myself (coming from perl, seeking to...get away from it)
> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now.
Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.
Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?
> In that context, I no longer feel inspired to contribute to a commons that’s being strip-mined by massive corporations
Open-source was always strip-mined by massive corporations. It was main source of free labour for decades.
Unfortunately there are always people willing to subsidise these corporations with their time for a badge of "honour" and few pats on the back.
Great to see more people awaken to the fact corporations thrive on unpaid work whilst making billions for their shareholders.
I am yet to see this trickle down wink
I really would like to believe that GPL is the answer here but I know it won’t change anything for them. If they can steal and destroy books, nothing will ever stop them.
If LLMs aren't an example of trickle down, I don't know what is
I know of at least 3 significant rails projects/donors that are actively discussing AI-lead refactors since DHH's talk declaring rails dead. Even if you like the language it's going to be a total mess in a year or two.
I'd rather tell LLM to rewrite project in Python. There is no good reason to use Ruby/Rails now, the community and job market is shrinking and the language is nothing special.
Ruby is definitely not bringing me joy since I have to see needlessly depressing articles like this. Rails did not bring me joy 12 years ago when I needed to update dependencies for a legacy cloud service we relied on. Ruby's middling syntax didn't bring me joy either, despite the hype of the time. My child named our cat Ruby, and I had to explain to fellow nerds that it wasn't inspired by the language.
The robots aren't as good as you think. Its just that we're sceamed at all fay by hoardes of people saying they are.
Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...
You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.
People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.
But the robots are mostly "fine", and "fine" is good enough for most things we get paid for: enterprise SaaS products, mobile apps, etc.
I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.
I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.
"But even beyond Rails, the Ruby language itself is now substantially developed using LLM agents. Matz is giving talks repositioning Ruby as a “Programming Language for AI age”, to be emitted by LLM agents, and stating that to be able to do that LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here."
Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.
Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.
You can't both be nice and believe that LLMs are useful tools?
Did you read the quote from the article?
> Ironically Oracle [...] is now being the good guy.
Reminder: oracle is also an acronym, and you might want to take a gander at what its subject is up to.
There is no future in which oracle is the good guy no matter the axis. Least of all the subject of AI.
> The biggest LLM sellouts in open source
I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.
Seems unnecessarily harsh. LLMs are a power tool. I'm not on-board with how it's being used in a lot of places, once things shake out I believe it's going to be net positive.
'Oracle is the good guy' is a sort of canary in the coal mine that perhaps you've got your worldview a bit upside down
I think that sentence wasn't written for autist AI cheerleaders with an AI girlfriend.
At some point in your life you may wonder why you're angry and miserable. Creating burner accounts to call people names should be high on your list of choices to introspect.
I'm glad someone else called out Matz on this.
He started being ambivalent about it maybe two years ago, and reached metastasis in the latest Rails World fiasco, with dhh telling him to his face that his life's work (Matz's terms) is irrelevant now.
Yep, the uncultivated race car driver (dhh) and the snowboarder (Lütke) own Matz now. They can insult him in public and he complies.
I'm not sure why he isn't rich enough to walk away.
God I hate these screeds. Especially not a fan of the slimy shots taken at DHH.
whatever... i guess pissed in his cheerios this morning and he decided to rage quit. trust me, you won't be missed. That's the best thing about LLMs and agents coding now... you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on. If you need it, you can create it or update it yourself now.
These developers whom have this God complex are going to find out they were Gods in their own minds real quickly.
> you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on
Is this really the way you look at open-source libraries that are given to you for free, i.e. as a gift? I hope you look differently at gifts people give you in real life.
I wrote open source libraries and frameworks for years. some successful, some not. I never bitched about it, I did it to give back and because I loved it.
Way to completely miss the point in the most embarrassing way possible.
I stand by what I said and the point wasn't missed. You can still program by hand if you want. This dude is just embarrassing himself by crying that he is no longer relevant since agents can do the work now.
> I stand by what I said
> thrownaway561
Interesting.
while I appreciate the authors contributions to the ecosystem, I dont recommend anyone throw a tantrum on their way out the door. So you disagree with DHH (On what? Just everything I guess? No discussion worth having at all?) and you disagree with Matz (we're supposed to intuit what the 'problem' is; I'm assuming that he uses LLMs?).
Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.
Workers, shut up and listen to your betters.
"I refuse to code in this language due to the language founders imagined future political leanings" is not a flex.
Even worse, "I refuse to code in this language because I disagree with political opinions of an author of a famous library that uses the language."
The list of things you can get canceled for is growing endlessly.
If your argument is strong, you don't need crutches like "imagined future" here. Nothing has to be imagined.
This is an overreaction. Yes, with AI we can all write our own features and bug fixes for open source, but there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
> there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.
I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future
Would you prefer we leave it entirely to the AIs? That’s an option, probably the default option. If you’re opposed to it, then why advocate for it?
I'm not really advocating for any position here - just pointing out that open-source maintainer was a thankless role before LLMs, and it's only become worse since.
a LOT of these arguments against New Thing seem to always fall into the category of "I no longer receive social credit for being a productive member of a niche in-group, so I quit.", masked as "They peed in the pool!".
The pool they're talking about isn't software or CS, it's the attached treadmill that provides social kudos and credit for a job well done.
This whole thing has been a huge revelation for me in that I naively presumed at first that other 'computer people' were also in it for the passion and interest in the hobby, now I am realizing quicker and quicker that "it's just a job" for the majority of people I talk to, the rest of the people do it "for exposure" , which is a nice way of saying that they're playing the Facebook/MySpace social kudos game with their linkedins and github profiles and blog articles.
very few Terry style "just passionate about the thing" people out there, and I had never realized how rare that was.
The social aspect of a craft is more than just "clout" or "smart creds" from an in-group, it is also collaboration, commentary, discussion, and the joy of helping others find their feet, for example. LLM-centric programming takes away not just the "clout" part but also all the other less egocentric social aspects of programming as a hobby. If the hobby's ecosystem gets whittled down to posting a finished demo and saying "look at what Claude did," well, what is there to talk about, really? The whole "process" aspect of the hobby gets obliterated, or at least effectively ceases to exist as a social phenomenon.
The author is more than welcome to take his interest wherever he wants, however:
> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now. I’m out.
This is way too spiteful to use as the closing message. Yes, we will ask AI agents, and chances are the code they'll write will be better.