I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me.

I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions.

Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software with less typing of code into a text editor.

If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

How often have you dropped in a big complex library like Moment.js just because you needed to convert a time from one format to another, and it would take too long to hand-write that one feature (and add tests for it to make sure it's robust)? With an LLM that's a single prompt and a couple of minutes of wait.

Using LLMs to build black box abstraction layers is a choice. We can choose to have them build LESS abstraction layers for us instead.

Our industry wants disruption, speed, delivery! Automatic code generation does that wonderfully.

If we wanted safety, stability, performance, and polish, the impact of LLMs would be more limited. They have a tendency to pile up code on top of code.

I think the new tech is just accelerating an already existing problem. Most tech products are already rotting, take a look at windows or iOS.

I wonder what will it take for a significant turning point in this mentality.

It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.

Out of curiosity, what did you pivot to?

It sounds crazy to say this, but I've been thinking about this myself. Not for the immediate future (eg 2026), but somewhere later.

This whole things of AI assisted and vibe coding phenomena including the other comments remind me of this very popular post on HN that keep appearing almost every year on HN [1],[2].

[1] Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

[2] Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095775

My work is better than it has been for decades. Now I can finally think and experiment instead of wasting my time on coding nitty-gritty detail, impossible to abstract. Last autumn was the game changer, basically Codex and later Opus 4.5; the latter is good with any decent scaffolding.

That's similar to what happened in Java enterprise stack: ...wrapper and ...factory classes and all-you-can-eat abstractions that hide implementation and make engineering crazy expensive while not adding much (or anything, in most cases) to product quality. Now the same is happening in work processes with agentic systems and workflows.

What are you pivoting to?

Could we all just agree to stop using the term "abstraction". It's meaningless and confusing. It's cover for a multitude of sins, because it really could mean anything at all. Don't lay all the blame on the c-suite; they are what they are, and have their own view. Don't moan about the latest egregious excess of some llm. If it works for you, use it; if it doesn't, don't. But, stop whinging.

> It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.

No profession collectively made such a decision. Programming was always very splitted into many, many subcultures, each with their own (mutually incompatible over the whole profession) ideas what makes a good program.

So, I guess rather some programmers inside some part of a Silicon Valley echo chamber in which you also live made such a decision.

  > the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.

But this usage? I'm fully on board. Too much abstraction is when it's incomprehensible. To who is the next question (my usual complaint is that a junior should not be that level) and I think you're right to point out that the "who" here is everyone.

We're killing a whole side of creativity and elegance while only slightly aiding another side. There's utility to this, but also a cost.

I think what frustrates me most about CS is that as a community we tend to go all in on something. We went all in on VR then crypto, and now AI. We should be trying new things but it more feels like we take these sides as if they're objective and anyone not hopping on the hype train is an idiots or luddite. The way the whole industry jumps to these things just feels more like FOMO than intelligent strategy. Like making a sparkling water company an "AI first" company... its like we love solutions looking for problems

What are you pivoting to?

What are you pivoting to?

Don't forget you are expected to deliver x10 for the same pay, "because you have the AI now".

> It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.

The ubiquitous adoption of LLMs for generating code is mostly a sign of bad abstraction or the absence of abstraction, not the excess of abstraction.

And choosing/making the right abstraction is kind of the name of the game, right? So it's not abstraction per se that's a problem.

Every technical person has been complaining about this for the entire history of computer programming

Unless you’re writing literal memory instructions then you’re operating on between 4 and 10 levels of abstraction already as an engineer

It has never been tractable for humans to program a series of switches without incredible number of abstractions

The vast majority of programmers never understood how computers work to begin with

So you're washing dishes now?

Is that really what he's saying here?

He's not against the technology, I think he's just feeling like there's a lot of potential that he's not quite grasping yet.

You didn't really read what he wrote or think about it and just took it as an opportunity to dismiss him as old. He was just being humble. It's relatively new to everyone. At least you are honest about your ageism.

I am sure Karparthy can and does everage AI as well or better than you. Probably I do also and I am 48.

This is pretty much the thinking across all German-speaking countries. It especially applies to anything related to energy (combustion engines, coal, gas, oil) and IT.

Case in point: fax machines are still an important part of business communication in Germany, and many IT projects are genuinely amateurish garbage — because the underlying mindset is "everything should stay exactly as it is."

This is particularly visible in the 45+ generation. It mostly doesn't apply to programmers, since they tend to find new things interesting. But in the rest of society, the effects are painful to watch: if nothing changes, nothing improves.

And then there's mobile infrastructure. It's not even a technical problem — it's purely political. The networks simply don't get expanded. It's honestly embarrassing how far behind Germany is compared to the rest of Europe.

WSJ has been writing increasingly about "AI Psychosis" (here's their most recent piece [0]).

I'm increasingly seeing that this is the real threat of AI. I've personally known people who have started to strain relationships with friends and family because they sincerely believe they are evolving into something new. While not as dramatic, the normalization of the use of "AI as therapist" is equally concerning. I know tons of people that rely on LLMs to guide them in difficult family decisions, career decisions, etc on an almost daily basis. If I'm honest, I myself have had times where I've leaned into this too much. I've also had times where AI starts telling me how clever I am, but thankfully a lifetime of low self worth signals warning flags in my brain when I hear this stuff! For most people, there is real temptation to buy into the praise.

Seeing Karpathy claim he can't keep up was shocking. It also immediately raises the question to anyone with a clear head: "Wait, if even Karpathy cannot use these tools effectively... just what is so useful about AI?" Isn't the entire point of AI that I can merely describe my problem and have a solution in a fraction of the time.

The fact that so many true believers in AI seem to forever be just a few more tricks away from really unleashing this power, starts to make it feel very much like magical thinking on a huge scale.

The real danger of AI is that we're entering into an era of mass hallucination across multiple fields and areas of human activity.

0. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatbot-psychosis-link-1abf9d...

I feel Karpathy is smart enough to deserve a less dismissive response than this.

I call it being "oneshot" by the AI.

We could call it "Hacker News syndrome"

Twitter folks call this LLM or AI Psychosis.

Slopbrain is interesting because Karpathy's fallacious argumentation mirrors the glib argument of an LLM/AI, it's like cognitively recursive, one feeding the other in a self-selecting manner.

> This sounds unbearable.

I can't see the original post because my browser settings break Twitter (I also haven't liked much of Karpathy's output), but I agree. I call this style of software development 'meeting-based programming,' because that seems to be the mental model that the designers of the tools are pursuing. This probably explains, in part, why c-suite/MBA types are so excited about the tools: meetings are how they think and work.

In a way LLMs/chatbots and 'agents' are just the latest phase of a trend that the internet has been encouraging for decades: the elimination of mental privacy. I don't mean 'privacy' in an everyday sense -- i.e. things I keep to myself and don't share. I mean 'privacy' in a more basic sense: private experience -- sitting by oneself; having a mental space that doesn't include anybody else; simply spending time with one's own thoughts.

The internet encourages us to direct our thoughts and questions outward: look things up; find out what others have said; go to wikipedia; etc. This is, I think, horribly corrosive to the very essence of being a thinking, sentient being. It's also unsurprising, I guess. Humans are social animals. We're going to find ourselves easily seduced by anything that lets us replace private experience with social experience. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone did this with programming tools, too.

> ... or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better.

It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.

As far as I can tell as a heavy coding agent user: you don’t need to know any of this and that’s a testament to how good code agent TUIs have become. All I do to be productive with a coding agent is tell it to break a problem down into tasks, store it inside beads, and then make sure each step is approved by me. I also add in a TDD requirement where it needs to build tests that fail then eventually pass.

Everything else I’ve used has been over engineered and far less impactful. What I just said above is already what many of us do anyway.

> This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config

Before LLM programming, this was at least 30-50% of my time spent programming, fixing one config and build issue after another. Now I can spend way more time thinking about more interesting things.

Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later.

Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

People did say that in the 90s. Hence the rush to put everything on the web, whether there was any real business case for it or not. And most of it went up in flames at the end of that decade.

If anything I'd expect all these tools to be easier for new engineers to adopt, unburdened by how things were before.

Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code. Now it feels increasingly like you can’t be an IC in that way anymore. You’re now coding through others, either humans or AI.

Sure, I can write code manually, but in my case I’m working full time on my own SaaS and I am absolutely faster and more effective with AI. It’s not even close. And the gains are so extreme that I can’t justify writing beautiful hand-crafted artisanal code anymore. It turns out that code that’s “good enough” will do, and that’s all I can afford right now.

But long-term, I don’t know that I want to do that work, especially for some corporation. It feels like the difference between being a master furniture craftsman, and then going work in an IKEA factory.

This is such a great way to frame all his comments.

My trick is to explicitly roll play that we’re doing a spike. This gets all of the models to ignore all of the details they normally get hung up on. Once I have the basics in place, I can tell it to fix details.

It’s _always_ easier to add more code than it is to fix broken code.

I have a hell of a time just getting any LLM to write SQL queries that have things like window functions, aggregates and lateral left joins - even when shoving the entire database schema DDL into the context.

It's so frustrating, it regularly makes me want to just quit the profession. Which is why I still just write most code by hand.

Sometimes I have a similar file or related files. I copy their names and say use them as reference. Code quality improves by 10 times if you do so. Even providing a a example from framework's getting started works great too for new project.

Yeah the pain of cleaning up small mess is great too. I had some tests failing and type failing issues, I thought I will fix it later by only using AI prompt. As the size was growing, failing Typescript issues was growing too. At some point it was 5000+ type issues and countless number of failing unit tests. Then more and more. I tried to fix with AI, since it was not possible fixing old way. Then I discarded the whole project when it was around 500k lines of code.

Most people have not fully grasped how LLM's work and how to properly utilize agentic coding solutions. That is the reason for issues when it comes to vibe coders having low quality code. But that is not the limitation of technology but the user (at this stage). Basically think of it this way everyone is the grandma that has been handed a palm pilot to use to get things done. Grandma needs an iPhone not a palm pilot but the problem is that we are not in that territory yet. So now consider the people who were able to use the palm pilot very successfully and well, they were few and they were the exception, but they existed. Same here. I have been using coding agent for over 7 months now and have written zero lines of code, in fact I don't know how to code at all. But i have been able to architect very complex software projects from scratch. Text to speech , automated llm benchmarking systems for testing all possible llama.cpp sampling parameters and more, and now im building my own agentic framework from scratch. All of these things are possible and more without writing one line of code yourself. But it does require understanding how to use the technology well to get this done.

I hardly ever open an IDE anymore.

I use Claude Code and Cursor. What I do:

- use statically typed languages: TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python w/ types

- Setup linters. For TS I have a bunch of custom lint rules (authored by AI) for common feedback that I've given. (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...)

- For Cursor, lots of feedback on my desired style. https://github.com/shepherdjerred/scout-for-lol/tree/main/.c...

- Heavy usage of plan mode. Tell AI something like "make at least 20 searches to online documentation", support every claim with a reference, etc. Tell AI "make a task for every little thing you'll implement"

- Have the AI write tests, particularly the more expensive ones like integration and end-to-end, so you have an easy way to verify functionality.

- Setup Claude Code GHA to automatically review PRs. Give the review feedback to the agent that implemented it, either via copy-pasting or tell the agent "fetch review comments and fix them".

Some examples of what I've made:

- Many features for https://scout-for-lol.com/, a League of Legends bot for Discord

- A program to generate TypeScript types for Helm charts (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/src/helm...)

- A program to summarize all of the dependency updates for my Homelab (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/src/deps...)

- A program to manage multiple instances of CLI agents like Claude Code (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...)

- A Discord AI bot in the style of my friends (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...)

What does your software creation workflow look like? Do you have a design phase?

This is what an AGENTS.md - https://agents.md/ (or CLAUDE.md) file is for. Put common constraints to correct model mistakes/issues with respect to the codebase, e.g. in a “code style” section.

Why would you spend $200 a day on Opus if you can pay that for a month via the highest tier Claude Max subscription? Are you using the API in some special way?

I’ve had decent results from it. What programming language are you using?

(for decades)

('since' takes time_point - 'for' takes time_duration)

you mean "one" not "once" right?

Touché! That's a good one.

Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again.

With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented several big features, fixed long standing issues and did migrations to new major versions of library dependencies that I wouldn’t have tackled at all on my own—I do this for fun after all, and updating Zod isn’t fun. Claude just does it for me, while I focus on high-level feature descriptions.

I’m still validating and tweaking my workflow, but if I can keep up that pace and transfer it to other projects, I just got several times more effective.

Let's wait one more year, and perhaps everyone who didn't fall victim to these "slimming pills” for developers' brains will be glad about the choice they made.

In that year, AI will get better. Will you?

I’ve been taking my son for stroller walks more often over Christmas. I bring a headset for listening to music, podcasts, audiobooks, tech talks. “Be effective.” But I end up just walking and thinking, realising this is “free time”.

It sounds ridiculous and easy to say spending time walking and thinking will improve your decisions and priorities that no productivity hack will.

I only actually did slow down for a while because I had to for the well-being of my family. Sure feels important to not always be on top of everyone else’s business.

I’ve become comfortable with using LLMs as “trusted advisors.”

I am not [yet] ready to just let an agent write a whole app or server for me, but I am increasingly letting them write a whole function for me.

They are also great “bug finders.” I can just feed some code, describe the symptoms, and ask for an observation. I often get great suggestions, including things like finding typos and copy/pasta problems.

I find that just this limited application has significantly increased my development velocity, and, I believe, the quality of my work.

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

Between subscription software and subscription AI and the rising prices of computer hardware, the idea of a "personal computer" is quickly dying.

Your employer is not paying for these things?

paying to train* and fund the research for the tools to replace us

I see it more like a playing a text adventure game. You give it commands and sometimes it works, and sometimes the results are unexpected.

Not to mention many companies speedrunning systems of strange and/or perverse incentives with AI adoption.

That being said, Welch’s grape juice hasn’t put Napa valley out of business. Human taste is still the subjective filter that LLMs can only imitate, not replace.

I view LLM assisted coding (on the sliding scale from vibe coding to fancy auto complete) similar to how Ableton and other DAW software have empowered good musicians that might not have made it otherwise due to lack of connections or money, but the music industry hasn’t collapsed completely.

> I can run fast enough.

Can you do some code reviews while you're running?

(Inception scene) here a minute is seven hours

Over 30 years code artisan here. AI has made me 100x more productive. No, I will not provide proof. Sam Altman is the best.

> For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated?

Every time, unless my initial request was perfectly outlined in unambiguous pseudocode. It's just too easy to write ambiguous requests.

Unambiguous but human-readable pseudocode is what I strive for now, though I will often ask AI to help edit the pseudocode to remove ambiguities prior to generating code.

That’s interesting. I wonder if the models will improve on these kinds of tiny niches?

The point is that all that research mostly doesn’t help in mastering the tool. Unlike traditional tools, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s like an alien tool just handed to us in exactly that sense.

Do you know who is the author ?

Yep when all this blows over, those who were least exposed to LLMs will be the winners. Patience is important and not to be drowned out by the noise.

Not sure what you mean by blindly prompting models

100% - I cant believe there are smart people in this conversation that dont see this.

If you dont understand AWS you can't vibe code a terraform codebase that creates a complex infrastructure .. etc

I have seen Claude disable its sandbox. Here is the most recent example from a couple of weeks ago while debugging Rust: "The panic is due to sandbox restrictions, not code errors. Let me try again with the sandbox disabled:"

I have since added a sandbox around my ~/dev/ folder using sandbox-exec in macOS. It is a pain to configure properly but at least I know where sandbox is controlled.

I'm working on a solution [0] for this. My current approach is:

1. Create a new Git worktree

2. Create a Docker container w/ bind mount

3. Provide an interface for easily switching between your active worktrees/containers.

For credentials, I have an HTTP/HTTPS mitm [1] that runs on the host with creds, so there are zero secrets in the container.

The end goal is to be able to manage, say, 5-10 Claude instances at a time. I want something like Claude Code for Web, but self-hosted.

[0]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...

[1]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/pull/156

If they cannot be trusted, why would you use them in the first place?

I run them inside a sandbox https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

That's true. The noise is being generated by people who are directly or indirectly incentivized to talk about it.

> coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is.

Agreed but not all engineers are involved with this aspect of the business and the concern applies to them.

Don’t you do retrospectives with your coding agents?

No, no, no.

We need to have a scrum with 3 agents each from the top 4 AI vendors, with each agent adhering to instructions given by a different programmer.

It's kind of like Robot Wars, except the damage is less physical and more costly.

I'm using it less and less now, since the sheen has worn off and I've been able to more accurately judge its capabilities. It's like an intern at everything it does and unfortunately I'm expected to produce better code than that.

Non determinism does not imply non correctness. You can have the LLM do 10 different outputs, but maybe all 10 are valid solutions. Some might be more optimal in certain situations, and some might appeal to different people aesthetically.

Non determinism of AI feels like a compiler which will on same input code spit out different executable on every run. Fixing bugs will become more like a ritual to satisfy whims of the machine spirit.

Also interesting is the possibility that a 10x boost for person A might still be slower than person B not using AI.

> FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish.

That's why I've never understood HN's continuing infatuation with him. He failed to deliver FSD to Tesla, and arguably even sent them down a R&D dead end, and he doesn't seem to have played a significant role in the generative AI revolution, only joining OpenAI after they developed ChatGPT. Yet when his talks or blog posts get posted here, they're met with almost uniformly positive comments, often many.

He reminds me of Sam Altman, where for a while, pointing out that pg's emperor was naked, that his first big "success" was a startup, Loopt, that devolved into a seedy, gaunt gay hookup app, slowly wasting away, that only got acquired thanks to face-saving VC string-pulling, and that that "success" was the springboard of all that followed (YC presidency, feeling out a gubernatorial campaign, OpenAI CEO)--that would get you swiftly flagged.

> This is from the man who has no finished open source projects

To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean?

The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla

That's a bummer if true. Is there a reliable source that lays that decision at Karpathy's feet?

I'm surprised too, considering that in https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904 he mentioned regarding his NanoChat repo

>Good question, it's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete). I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution.

And a lot of the tooling he mentioned in OP seems like self-imposed unnecessarily complexity/churn. For the longest time you could say the same about frontend, that you're so behind if you're not adopting {tailwind, react, nodejs, angular, svelte, vue}.

At the end of the day, for the things that an LLM does well, you can achieve roughly the same quality of results by "manually" pasting in relevant code context and asking your question. In cases where this doesn't work, I'm not convinced that wrapping it in an agentic harness will give you that much better results.

Most bespoke agent harnesses are obsoleted by the time of the next model release anyway, the two paradigms that seem to reliably work are "manual" LLM invocation and LLM with access to CLI.

I think the evidence is that even amongst evangelists, they all seem to have different sets of key techniques that change every few months.

He meant to post that from his alt account 'regularcoderguy'

His "youtube course" already exists, and it's absolutely transformational.

He's working on a more formal educational framework/service of some kind, which will presumably not be free, but what he's already posted is some of the most effective CS pedagogy I've ever encountered (and personally benefited from.)

I've worked really hard over the last year at working out how to use these things, and it has more than paid off.

But I think if I had started learning today instead of a year ago, I'd get up to speed in more like 6 months instead of a year. A lot of stuff I learned a year ago is not really necessary anymore, but furthermore, there's just a lot more information out there about how to use these from people who have been learning it on their own.

I just don't think people who have ignored it up until now are really that far behind.

> Behind who[m]?

Why, the other rats in front of you in the race, of course!

As the pithy, if cheese expression goes, read not the times; read the eternities. People who spend so much time frantically chasing superficial ephemera like this are people without any sense of life's purpose. They're cogs in some hellish consumerist machine.