> I must admit that for a few days I felt very depressed about it all. Not about “AIs writing all the code” - that much is clear to me, and I do not lament the changing landscape of the craft

If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment. People coding on their own time won't be left behind. It's your own time to use as you like. And if you want to take a longer time to hand craft a library or your pet project, more power to you.

Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense. But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd. This also isn't true for all paid programming work and will continue not to be, despite the marketing hype.

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Ntrails 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense

First, I offloaded the tedious. There was no real joy there. Then I offloaded the merely time consuming - after all I could have more fun on interesting problems.

But suddenly everything is too difficult, and I am not going to get any better at those pieces by glancing over ai prs. Still, this is what I do

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tra3 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd.

Unfortunately (?) this seems to be the ground truth for the majority of people I speak to. What's not clear to me yet, is whether we'll stop reading code. I suspect that reading is going away as well. There's a push at $WORK to expedite 50-files/20,000 line PRs via agentic reviews..

If this continues, then language readability and "pleasure" of hand coding will likely diminish. I'm still not clear where we're going to land with libraries and re-use. Non-technical pressures are forcing functionality to be re-vibe coded instead.

I've always loved Rails for its pragmatic approach; I've delivered many projects with it. I'll be sad when it disappears but it seems inevitable.

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goatlover 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

If it gets to the point that developers no longer need to write or read code, just manage agentic swarms, then what is the reason for developers?

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tra3 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

I've been thinking about this too, since my livelihood depends heavily on this answer.

As far as I can tell, agentic software development (aka vibe coding) simply doesn't scale for lay people. At $WORK, I'm seeing the 5th version of the same small project being rewritten by execs. The 5th version is marginally better than the previous 4, but it still has major problems. 5th version has no CI and accesses 6 databases directly. These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.

I've been asked this question by non-software people and the best answer I've come up so far is this. You can go to the hardware store and purchase a chainsaw. You can now prune small trees. This does not make you an arborist though. For reference check out YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arborist+fails+...

Thoughts?

	▲	zer00eyz 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient. Tell me you weren't around for the dot com bubble without telling me. At that point in time if you told any one you could build on the web they spent an hour pitching you their bad idea and then wanted you to build it for nothing. They thought the value was in the idea, not the implementation. Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate. IF that results in a viable product then you need an engineer to go in and do the needed work to operationalize it. To attach testing, monitoring, deployment and more over cost metrics (something we have not really done in the last 30 years) - because a good idea that costs more to run than it makes is not a good idea. The nuance is here - the "tweak this and we can save $0.50 a user a month" is how you move the needle at scale. Programing is dead, Software development has a narrow place - engineering for sustainability, reliability and cost are what the field is going to become. Someone has to be responsible, or be on the hook for the 3am on a holiday weekend phone call.

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sublinear 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment.

We don't necessarily like writing the code by hand, but those of us in this situation don't really have a choice and it pays the bills (handsomely, I might add; not complaining at all).

Every line of code has the entire organization behind it due to requirements that cannot budge an inch. There's also lots of rigorous manual testing beyond what is already automated. The automation efforts for this kind of software, sometimes going on decades, has left no stone unturned yet lots of human work (and payroll cost) remains.

This is what a real business looks like once it's settled into its competitive niche, and I'm routinely surprised how many devs on HN are not in this kind of role. Those people who are forced to lean hard on AI are at the highest risk of unemployment, and I have to assume they're either junior or made a lot of questionable career choices.

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dist-epoch 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I wish I understood what goes on in the mind of people which today insist it's absurd to believe that LLMs can code, and that it's all marketing hype.

The strength of the Reality Distorsion Field would make the one of Steve Jobs pale in comparison.