What gets me is the craft point. I've shipped more useful software in the last year than probably the previous five combined, and most of that is because I stopped treating code as the artifact and started treating the product as the artifact. The craft moved up a layer.

> until it is clear and elegant

New grads who spend weeks refactoring code are going to get lapped by new grads who ship something and iterate. There's just a faster feedback loop now.

Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Circumstantial

I sense that the frustration you feel is that professors are able to make choices based on their values, but the average person is not. That is broadly speaking, of course.

I think it is a great shame that we live in a modern world where we do we must to survive regardless of how it makes us feel. I suspect it is the root of much suffering.

Completely agree that it's off-putting. The author indeed has only ever worked in academia per his LinkedIn.

But disagree that this is a path to unemployment. At work we go very fast and yet I think fast is compatible with each of those points, just not in all situations.

Marc Brooker, distinguished eng at AWS, gives much more useful advice for industry, as you'd expect given his almost 30 years in industry.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/25/ic-junior.html

Doesn't matter who reads it. The point is that you will probably never learn to do "high level system design" well if you do not have enough experience writing and refactoring code yourself. It's like you wanting to become the chef of a kitchen and giving instructions without having ever prepped food.

There is indeed something useful about trying to write elegant code. Not because others read it. But because that's how you learn about the engineering tradeoffs and abstraction that exist everywhere.

I think you are making exactly his point. Practicing code as a craft, caring about how you do it, how well you do it, and what it’s ultimately used for is, as you correctly point out, not going to bring you profit or employment.

So maybe there’s something wrong with how we organise work?

He is not giving advice to the industry, he is giving advice to aspiring programmers and computer scientists. He has no experience in industry, but has produced lots of high quality software and research.

I do sympathize with the viewpoint that many academics are not in a position to give good advice about industry since many of them either never worked in industry or had limited exposure via internships. Additionally, the values of academia are sometimes different from industry. Academia, at least in its purest form, is about advancing and disseminating knowledge, while industry is about serving customers through providing products and services.

With that said, I discovered that I’m an academic at heart after nine years in industry, though I left right before agentic coding took off. I got tired of “moving fast and breaking things,” of prioritizing shipping things and “the bottom line” over everything else.

With that said, agentic coding, in my opinion, only amplifies long-standing trends, that shipping matters more than craftsmanship. Even without LLMs, software engineering has long had a “git ‘er done!” attitude. To be fair, market effects matter greatly in software businesses. Quality matters insofar as avoiding completely unusable software, but many software companies succeed without building carefully-crafted software. Even Apple, which has a reputation for being perfectionistic, doesn’t make perfect software.

Academia has its own problems (publish-or-perish, low pay compared to other occupations that require heavy investments in education, politics, etc.), but it seems to allow more breathing room for computer scientists to focus on the craft of programming without as much pressure to ship (publish-or-perish aside).

I agree, some of this is awful advice for a entry level engineer:

> * Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable.

An entry level engineer is going to be inundated with a lot of technology they've never heard of and a lot of power structures and group dynamics that are new to them. They're not even in a position to be making these judgements until they actually learn about how professional software development actually works.

> * Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better.

That's great, but also, there are not many entry level roles where someone is going to be in a position to be making these kinds of decisions, other than avoiding a company altogether.

> * Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners.

Yikes. A software engineering job is not a PhD program. If you are refactoring your code and someone is telling you to hurry up, you should probably wrap it up. You need to ship your code or you won't have a job.

> If a tree falls in the forest...

I hope this is a pun on the content management system used to publish OP. It's forester[0], written in OCaml and parses TeX-like .tree files into semantic XML which uses browser XSLT to render the HTML.

View source on the page to get an idea.

Reminder of what the idealised web promise from decades ago was. Long gone. Very apt.

[0] https://www.forester-notes.org/index/index.xml

Why do you think this is industry advice? I can't find anything here that indicates that it's the case? Maybe they just feel this is the right thing to do.

Hilariously his site doesn't even have HTTPS. Seems like corner cutting to me!

The author stated your concerns at the beginning of his post. He prefaced his post saying what the industry wants is the antithesis of what he believes in.

I generally agree with what he stated. We should clearly define our moral and technical redlines. Lines we will never cross because they will be tested every day.

It’s not industry advice, it’s life advice. Believe it or not, there exists a world outside what’s trending in the tech industry, and the outside world is also much bigger, much more important, and considered by many more to be the point of both education and life.

You were gifted a breath of fresh air, and thought only “well this does a terrible job of smelling like my room”.

The industry's goal is to ship fast and profitably. A learner's goal isn't.

>I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose.

The engineer who only does high level system design and never codes has existed for decades and is often the most useless and derided engineer in the org.

From the author’s earlier essay:

“A good way to describe myself is as a generative AI vegetarian. You can find a fuller explanation—and many, many links—at the above essay by Sean Boots, which I agree with almost 100%.”

—-

Given the capabilities of upcoming LLMs, I suspect that by mid-2027, most competent companies, outside specific niches, will not hire and might fire any non-senior “generative AI vegetarian” software developer.

Whenever I hear this kind of argument, I basically let the person know their argument is fine as long as

  1) they are going to pay me competitive money to "go slowly", "polish my code", or whatever, or
  2) they are actively working on getting me UBI

This. Exactly this. You'll be unemployed. He'll still have tenure.

  > Who is going to read your carefully crafted documentation lol?

Look at how people use LLMs these days. People frequently use it on new codebases to get up to speed on the code. Frankly because it's a lot faster than grepping, profiling, and all the digging we'd normally do (though those still have benefits and you're still going to do them. Hell, the LLMs even do them). But how much of that could have been avoided had people just taken a few seconds to document their code? No one is saying sit down and document the whole thing but "add a few comments when you add new functions" or "update comments in places you touch". If it costs you more than a minute of your time you're probably doing it wrong.

I'm tired of these arguments. People are turning molehills into mountains. It's so incredibly myopic. We waste so much fucking time on things because we're trying to move fast. But no one seems to understand the difference between speed and velocity. It never mattered how fast you go, it has always been about velocity. Going fast in the wrong direction is harming you, not helping. If you don't have the time to know if you're headed in the right direction or not then you're probably not.

  > Outside of the bit on avoiding cutting corners

Those are all corners cut that end up wasting tons of man hours. Sure, they save you a few precious seconds or minutes now, but at the cost of hours or days in the future.

Here's the thing, if you don't take those shortcuts, then none of those tasks are hard. Even refactoring. But as soon as you start taking those shortcuts they start compounding. Then a year down the line your company is writing a blog post about how your code is 500x faster now that it's written in rust (or whatever the cool kids use). If it's 500x faster that's not because a language change, it's because tech debt. And like all debt it accumulates little by little and it's the compounding interest that really kills you.

Sorry, I'm tired of cleaning up everybody's messes. Go ahead, move fast and break things. It's a great way to learn (I do it too!), but don't make others clean up your mess.

Stop buying into this bullshit of needing to move so fast. It's the same anti-pattern scammers use to get you to make poor decisions. Stop scamming yourselves

This has been my experience with academia also. I have an MBA (gasp!) and the best profs were the ones who had real world experience.

Despite the common rhetoric you see in HN comments about how MBA programs only teach graduates how to cut costs by enshittifying, I actually found it a great education that made me a better engineer.

Anyway,

The best profs were the ones who'd worked in industry. One guy who taught finance worked on Wall Street and was fond of distinguishing between how the textbook taught a particular technique or fact, and how practitioners actually do it in real life. Got taught startup valuation by a guy who'd been a VC, competitive strategy by a guy who was a strategy consultant for companies you'd actually heard of, etc.

The worst profs were the ones like the guy who taught operations. He'd never worked a real job. Went straight from being a student to being a TA to a postdoc to a "research prof", whatever that means. All his examples and case studies were useless or overly simplistic to the point of being useless.

The fact that TFAuthor is concerned with polishing one's craft shows they're completely divorced from what actually happens outside the ivory tower. Typing code into a buffer has never been the hard part.

In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though.

Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it.

Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiations. But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.

As others have said, my comp sci degree also had a required ethics course. But it’s also pretty silly to think that a single ethics course where people don’t pay attention is going to change the hearts and minds of students. No amount of discussion about therac is going to make someone question if they should really be working for palantir or raytheon

Every ABET accredited CS course (almost every CS course in the US I think?) requires an Ethics in Computer Science credit. I remember going over a lot of case studies, including Therac 25, but our course also included a lot of general grounding in ethics and philosophy as well, which I enjoyed a lot.

I pull from these articles when teaching:

'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719

'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2

I went from being a largely self taught software dev with a small 1-man software business to working as a nurse in the US, and a lot of the motivation to make that change was that I wanted to spend my time doing work that I felt genuinely made the world better. Tech has incredible potential for good but the actual industry itself in my eyes has extremely perverse incentives and no strong moral foundation like that which exists in nursing/healthcare. Nurses broadly consider themselves to be patient advocates and the voice for people who often can't have their own voice. As you can imagine, this culture is not in line with the modern pursuit of healthcare profits but yet nurses stay fighting the good fight. I see these battles play out nearly every day I go to work and while it's usually done professionally these are real battles with jobs on the line.

In a perfect world I think the software industry would have instilled these same virtues- software is just as (or more) capable of causing harm as poor healthcare. Yet we seem to be racing to a dystopian future at record speed courtesy of the tech industry, and our modern egalitarian societies will not survive that transition.

Ah, ethics - the silver bullet which will magically make good people out of bad people.

My Computer Engineering degree had an "ethics" course (really a course on "engineering communications", but it was considered to satisfy the ethics requirement for graduation). It was a semester on how to file memos, cargo-cult your resume, and tell recruiters what they wanted to hear. Not a word was said about considering the implications of the things you're hired to build. When defense contractors took over the entire ground floor of the engineering building to hold a recruiting fair, we were encouraged to go.

The only time ethics in engineering was ever mentioned to me was in a class on applied number theory (cryptography), taught by a professor who had previously worked for the EFF. He went off-topic to tell us that many problems, like how to hit a target with a missile, may fascinate and compel us as engineers, but we shouldn't let that distract us into building instruments of death.

That course was an elective, and it was entirely possible to complete my degree without hearing a single mention of ethics.

There are many reasons I look back on my academic experience with disdain, but this one stands out to me.

The 90ies weren't perfect, but it felt more idealistic to me, with the rise of open source software. People thought about ethics a bit more. It felt like the ultimate tide rising to empower people locally on their own computers, and that tide has been going out for some years. A bit with cloud computing, and now a lot more with LLM's. And the company a lot of SV people keep these days is pretty gross.

FWIW: I had a mandatory ethics class in my US program (Vanderbilt, a rich private school in the American south). It was mandated for all engineers AFAIR, and taught by an engineering prof.

Pretty good experience, too! Sometimes got distracted with general tech ethics rather than strictly professional ethics, but tbf that’s a very fun+timely topic

It is very weird how that happens. I hardly expected starting a marathon training program to drastically increase my day to day energy. But here we are.

I remain hopeful that some day someone will train an LLM which is tolerable to people who take this stance (which I respect, much like I respect food vegetarians despite not being one myself).

I've been tracking models trained entirely on out-of-copyright data, for example. I've not yet seen one of those which appears generally useful and didn't chuck in a scrape of the web or get fine-tuned on examples generated by a non-vegetarian model.

Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

Why do I care? This post is a great example. If you're a professor of computer science I really want you to be able to tinker with this fascinating class of models without violating your principles.

UPDATE: Huh, speaking of potentially vegetarian models, I just saw https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie on the HN homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927903

I've explored I different out-of-copyright trained model Mr Chatterbox before but found it to have been mildly corrupted through the help of synthetic conversation pairs from Haiku and GPT-4o-mini - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/mr-chatterbox/

Talkie isn't entirely pure either though: "Finally, we did another round of supervised fine-tuning, this time on rejection-sampled multi-turn synthetic chats between Claude Opus 4.6 and talkie, to smooth out persistent rough edges in its conversational abilities."

> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources

This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.

* real programmers write assembly, not FORTRAN

* real programmers manage memory, it's a craft

* real programmers don't drag and drop

* real programmers don't use intellisense

* real programmers don't need stack overflow

* real programmers don't tab-complete

* real programmers don't need copilot

* real programmers don't use llms <- you are here

How has not honing their craft and churning out generic slop instead as fast as possible worked out for artists?

Everybody can do that now with zero training.

LLMS are the ultimate equalizer. You won't have a future if you can only do average things fast. It's time to become eccentric, and the academic bubble is perfect for that.

See below that:

'Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same.'

for the curious, this is mentioned by the author in another post.

http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/009L/index.xml

I don't know why everything has to be so polarized these days. You can use LLMs without it making you an idiot or delusional or psychotic or something. Are there issues with them? Of course. Are there people and organizations that rely on them too heavily? Without a doubt. Does recognizing that they have utility and using them as another tool in your arsenal mean you think they're infallible and are a suitable substitute for your own capacity to think? Obviously not.

It's really tiring. You can't even talk about the pros and cons of the technology now without people immediately jumping to their respective sides over it. It either has to be all good or all bad. No nuance allowed.

The position espoused by the author of the article is so extreme it makes them look ignorant and foolish. I would want my teacher to be more open-minded/curious and have a more nuanced opinion than that.

I totally agree and have been thinking about this lately. My son has been been doing an incredible amount of engineering work on a fun side project manually including 3D design and printing, soldering etc. But he used Ai to program an arduino. I want him to understand the code but I'm trying to find the balance between the school classes, and all the other things needed for this project. He doesn't have time dive into it all right now. This project is giving him exposure but maybe the coding doesn't need to be done manually just yet.

The fact of the matter is that "the craft" is beautiful when you are free to work on academic projects that are concerned with knowledge. In practice, industrial and commercial code is rarely that beautiful. Look at the offering of dev tools designed to reign in the ugliness and help manage the chaos. I'm sort of old school in this regard, but for some time now, many devs rely on all sorts of tooling to write the code, tooling that removes a layer of contact with manual processes of programming and so forth.

It's important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical. The flippant answers of "idealists" refuse to engage with the messy domain of facts, because it is aesthetically offensive or challenges their comfort or their nostalgia. The steam engine wasn't inevitable either, but people did choose it. How many today in this forum grumble about the loss of a world when the steam engine replaced old ways of working? The next generation won't have these sorts of hangups, just as we don't have them about steam engines. Or, if you like, how many pine for the days of assembly programming?

When something proves to be too useful industrially to opt out of, then it will be adopted. People will choose it. If you want to be Amish, go for it, but most people don't.

> This took a lot of courage.

It was important to say, but I very much doubt there was any courage involved.

Courage is not the appropriate word

Not sure how this is supposed to help earn money or be a path to financial independence. Can you elaborate?

This person is a Luddite. I just don't think that implies what most people on HN wish it would imply, though, as reading thea actual article shows. You don't even need to ask your LLM of choice to summarize it for you, as the salient point is contained within the first two paragraphs: paragraph one, the Luddites were workers protesting their terrible living conditions. Paragraph two, these workers were jailed and killed by the government.

Then, further down the article, it elaborates:

> The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories paired with decreasing birth rates and a rise in education standards in England and Wales.

> Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labour practices of the time.

>The crisis led to widespread protest and violence, but the middle classes and upper classes strongly supported the government, which used the army to suppress all working-class unrest, especially the Luddite movement.

And they had a valid point.

This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good.

In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial.

Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?

This line again.

Interesting.

I spent 8 years in academia (2004 - 2012) before moving to Industry. But as I've aged I've thinking of going back. I made it good in Industry so I have enough to jump to Academia without worrying about money... but I just hated the "publish or perish" mentality, and writing papers (I wonder what's the state of that now with LLMs... back in the day I was reviewer for some journals and most papers were pretty bad).

Only if you’re so rich that your degree doesn’t need to pay for itself.

It's presently #48, what's your definition of front page?.. that's still high ranking (bots and flame-war discussions generally drag a story down, although all posts must endure this)

Produce something 3X as good, I guess, and have one of the handful of jobs where your boss can recognize that.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

Slow can be fast.

As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code. If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".

provided you have the financial freedom to, don't apply to jobs where this mentality is rewarded.

After getting my CS degree I deliberately went into a sector where I suspected this kind of attitude doesn't exist (defense in my case) because already then I felt the whole web/startup culture had very little to do with software engineering.

The academics teach philosophy. A professors job is to profess after all.

I don't think he believes he is the first or only one to think this. He is just safe enough or at least hopes he is to speak out against the ills of technology. Do you know how many engineers cannot speak up right now for fear of losing their jobs? Lots.

This forum, unfortunately, selects for FAANG mercenaries. Other forums will have radically different takes.