I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.

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supaflybanzai 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it really that hard to understand?

Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.

Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.

How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?

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plastic-enjoyer 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.

[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.

	▲	supaflybanzai 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I kind of agree. But I think LLMs just make it way worse than Sprint boot, enterprise middleware or anything similar ever could. And I still very much like using LLMs for certain things. I do not miss Googling for hours to compile the right information.

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Matl 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.

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plastic-enjoyer 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Valued by whom? The market? Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing. They do it for the love of it. If something's only worth doing when someone pays a premium for it, boy, you're in for a hard time.

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Matl 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Valued by whom? The market?

No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.

It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.

> Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing

Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.

I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.

	▲	plastic-enjoyer 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking. Yet. But I doubt you'll find that appreciation here on Hacker News, or on GitHub. You'll probably have to find a community of like-minded people who enjoy tinkering with software by hand, and those already exist, e.g. parts of the IndieWeb, or Lobsters. Posting your hand-crafted software here is a bit like a knitting enthusiast showing off their sweater at a textile industry trade fair.

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physicallyIllfr 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.

1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.

2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)

3. Less people can do it.

-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.

The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.

Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.

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na1026 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.