I think this works unironically. My mother is an avid gardener and can spend 8 hours a day gardening. When her life circumstances allowed for it, she hired a once a week gardener to do the tasks she didn't like (or had difficulties doing as a small woman), and still gardens the same amount. I've teased her for hiring a gardener, but she swears it's a huge help and boost to her gardening quality of life.

this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark.

I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.

I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.

It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.

*I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is really making me enjoy landscape design again!

The proper analogy would be you can now remove all weeds with the swipe of your hand and cut all your hedges with another swipe, you still are gardening you can do it quicker and therefore explore different possibilities.

No you didn’t. You lead a team of gardeners to develop your grand vision. Or you directed an epic movie leading a cast of talented actors bringing your vision to life. You can choose an empowering analogy or a negative one it’s your choice.

Oh, the joy that awaits you when you come back home to discover how the gardener interpreted "please trim the hedge by the gate a little".

I used to be big into amateur radio. When I was considering to build a tower, I would have paid someone to build the tower for me and do the climbing work to mount stuff on the tower. Your statement is nonsensical, because it assumes that there is a binary choice between "do everything yourself" and "delegate everything".

Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away

Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.

As mosburger says, this is a great analogy. Do you think that the great artists paint, sculpt, and draw everything by hand, by themselves? Of course not... they never did, and they don't today. You're being offered the ability to join their ranks.

It's your studio now. You have a staff of apprentices standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.

>The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing

Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio.

Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it.

Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a place as relic was occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful too.

Oh man, modding Company of Heroes was one of the things that got me into programming. I look back fondly on those memories.

If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one.

I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.

Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.

Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.

Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.

So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.

At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my fault).

Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.

I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code.

Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

You switch difficulties, like you do in a game. Play on Hard or Survival mode now. Build greater and more amazing things than you ever did before.

We have never, ever, written what the machine executes, even assembly is an abstraction, even in a hex editor. So we all settle for the level of abstraction we like to work at. When we started (those of our age) most of us were assembly (or BASIC) programmers and over time we either increased our level of abstraction or didn't. If you went from assembly -> C -> Java/Python you moved up levels of abstraction. We're not writing in Python or C now, we are writing in natural language and that is compiled to our programming languages. It's just the compiler is still a bit buggy and opinionated!! And yes for some low level coding you still want to check the assembly language, some things need that level of attention.

I learn more in a day coding with AI than I would in a month without it, it's a wonderful two-way exchange, I suggest directions, it teaches me new libraries or techniques that might solve the problem. I lookup those solutions and learn more about my problem space. I feel more like a university student some days than a programmer.

Eventually this will probably be the end of coding and even analytical work. But I think that part is still far off (and possibly longer than we'll still be working for) in the meantime actually this for me is as exciting as the early days of home computing. It won't be fun for ever, the Internet was the coolest thing ever, until it wasn't, but doesn't mean we can't enjoy the summer while it's summer.

>With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them.

That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.

I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.

but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?

If so, other sites beckon.

Thanks... It was magical at the time... I've thought a lot about why it was magical over the years... I think if you boil away all the space stuff, Homeworld was a story about people who knew in their hearts that they were special and destined for something greater than the universe was willing to allow. And they went through hell to discover that they were right. Looking back, I think that's a story a lot of us on this thread (inc. me) can relate to.

Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.

The skybox with texture maps was our original plan too. The problem was that GPUs didn't have enough RAM to hold anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup.

Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.

For sure. Docker is rad (sorry Docker!)... all I'm saying is that I am not proud of the fact that I can do it and I don't think it moves the awesome needle - but it's still hard to get right and a pain in the ass. It's just an example of something I appreciate that I can automate now.

Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the world when all of us find the passion to create again.

Why is your last paragraph nearly identical to the last paragraph you are replying to? It might have been a strange quirk, but there’s also been the suggestion that the post you’re replying to is an imposter, so it gets weirder that you also did that.

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