I’ve enjoyed it too.

One of the fun things to do would be to use the 8 hrs of work to spend about 4-5 hrs working on deliverables, which was usually sufficient to exceed expectations, using 2-3 of the remaining hours (I’d keep 1-2 hrs for myself), to make significant architectural improvements.

I’d bring in an improvement every 6 months or so and suddenly the app would get significantly better and I’d get credit for it.

> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.

I have no idea where you work but 90% of companies are not like that. In fact, it's the opposite: filled with awful management, terrible timelines and legacy code.

Engineering had always been a nuisance to them and getting basic approval for maintenance regarding technical debt has been an uphill battle.

Wow. That was hardly ever the case in my experience in ~30 years in the industry. I enjoy(ed) what you’re describing too but… how common was this for you?

>I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom

Where do you work! :)

> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.

The nicest thing was when you nailed down the architecture and then you are mostly twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the PM guys to have the next feature idea. Maintenance and bug fixing is a breeze.

In a big production codebase with lots of active customers and data, architecture changes still feel pretty difficult even with LLMs accelerating them by an order of magnitude — migrating and backfilling data and all of that. That’s more complex than pointing Claude at a repo and saying “rewrite this in Rust.”

I guess you’re right, though - what is the ROI of keeping the architecture clean? It certainly saves time and money later, but it’s unclear if it’s a net win.

(It’s of course also significant to note that the upfront work of figuring out the right architecture and keeping the code clean has also been correspondingly reduced as well. Both sides of the equation are affected…)

The industry never really figured out a way to reliably answer this question in the pre-LLM days either, so… I suspect it will continue to be hard to determine.

in my experience it takes more than a day to sufficiently migrate bad architecture to a good one. like, many more days than it took to vibe the original implementation. having the prototype is good to understand what you want, but then going back and rebuilding it properly is a longer task. which is fine.

We were always replacing ourselves: Every "reusable" function or class or library you ever wrote represents lines of code won't get paid to write again. Every compiler takes jobs away from assembly coders.

The looming thing today is qualitatively different, because it's not formalizing something to reliably mass-produce.

It’s a point that isn’t made often. AI is mostly saying the quiet part out loud.

The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.

I enjoy coding deeply, and my feelings are not that simple.

I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.

I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.

Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.

There are many of us who enjoyed coding, and who enjoy the new paradigm, too.

> and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.

I’ve been coding over four decades and it is clear to me that most programmers don’t know how the stuff works, and not just script kiddies but some PhDs I worked with.

For those who want to know how it works, LLMs are massive enablers. I’ve written so many debugging and inspection tools with an LLM; had a model explain the assembly language produced; had rubber duck conversations with it. I’m having such fun tbh.

That's a very simplistic view. I'm very good at writing tests and I'm happy to offload writing tests to LLMs, as long as they follow the structure I've provided.

You're saying that I must not be good in writing tests, irregardless on how I feel about test writing.

This is an extremely “all or nothing” take. I love computers and started programming in elementary school. I am having more fun now building software than I can remember.

I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.

But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.

That's reductive.

I love writing code, but I don't love every single part of writing code. In particular, I really disliked getting stuck on some irrelevant detail, some mysterious error that had nothing to do with my code (dep issues, OS quirks, silent changes, auth failures, researching alternatives), and spinning my tires, unable to work on what I wanted to accomplish. Often I never made it through the far side; I've got a project directory littered with half-finished projects.

Having an AI to figure all that junk out for me so I can focus on the thing I want to build is fantastic. I worry about losing the grip I still have, but for now I've lost some things I loved (a lot of actual code-writing, solving nice straightforward problems), but gained what might as well be superpowers to help with some real shortcomings I had. It's been a net-positive trade for me so far.

And none of my personal projects have made me rich yet...

You can love technology and still have thought that coding was a required path to get to technology and not the ends unto itself.

If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.

> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents

In other words, people who just wanted to become managers.

Why did you expand it from what he said? I love technology, I enjoy being able to solve problems with technology and coding. I've always felt neutral about the actual act of coding, it was always just a means to the end and now I love that I can do more problem solving in less time and with less toil (from my view). But I guess I was just in it for the money.

I got into software later in life because I wanted to be able to send my kids to college, have healthcare and not destroy my body by 50. Up until my 40s I was a landscaper who had been an amateur programmer and technologist since my teens. I worked really, really hard to get where I am. I went to a bootcamp 5 nights a week for a year after breaking my back all day at my “real job”, while also taking care of a wife and two kids.

I enjoy what I do but I confess to being “in technology” because I need to earn a living not because it’s some sort of passion project. I think it’s pretty horrible to wish us all out of job so you can feel superior again.

I love all those things, started coding as a 10 year old(30 years ago).

The stuff I’m building is things I could only dream of before. With LLMs, I can build things in a year that would have taken me a lifetime before.

> People who hated coding, technology, problem solving and only were in it for the money love managing a bunch of agents.

Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.

FWIW I hate huge chunks of the industry + its inhabitants and am somewhat happy that my GPU can replace a significant amount of interactions with it and them.

Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech. We can be free[1].

__

[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine

Generally, people hate generalizations

Most of the code I was paid to write is a burden. I've spent far more hours writing generic CRUD apps, debugging overly complex javascript tooling (almost always out of date) and other tedious grunt work.

I don't think it's fair to say that all SWEs swing one way or the other. I absolutely love the fact that I will never have to waste time debugging cargo culted, trendy libraries ever again while I am also sad I'll also never to get hand write elegant implementations of interesting problems ever again either (unless for fun).

I would be happy to keep writing code but I'm also happy to be liberated from the type of code I was often paid to write.

For me typing out code was always the annoying part. The fun comes from fixing problems, optimizing for speed, making the UX flow better and visuals look nice, all things that are on the level of software not code.

Agents help you bang out good code faster if you know how to use them. My relationship to Claude and DeepSeek is somewhere between an IDE, a coworker and a friend (I still have real friends don't worry).

I don't treat it as a world changing magic wand that fundamentally changes the way everything works. It's more like a fast forward button that lets me skip the boring part in exchange for some hand holding. No more dealing with syntax errors or finding trivial bugs.

Totally, I can't quite imagine an AI automating my use of AI tough, how it would infer what prompt I would use at any given time, the problem space is infinite. Am I adding another *arr app to my stack, are we building a SPA, a home automation plugin, whatever. These are things that I want to do and AI helps with that.

In the corporate setting I think though it won't take a lot of time to reduce the layers and number of people that are required to run a software company. Either one becomes a more general work manager or obsolete I guess.

It is remarkable to me how few people seem to understand it is a much smaller step for AI-generated software to kill the need for companies of idea men than it was for them to kill the need for people writing code.

All of your potential customers are just going to vibecode their own software. In many cases they won't even realize that the software they vibecoded even exists as it will just be an invisible tool the LLM built for itself to reproduce a similar solution to a similar prompt over and over.

Once AI flattens out any company enough, the company itself no longer needs to exist, it can trivially be replaced by the model providers. Companies exist to be collections of skilled people with a common goal. When you don't need that, you don't need companies. The agents can work for your customer instead of you and nothing changes except who gets paid (not you).

There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.

> It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others

The most vocal denouncers of egoism are utterly pathologic egoists themselves.

I don't think your expectation is reasonable for the majority.

Tell us more about your mastery of every creative domain.

No, that's not quite the same.

Not everyone is going to publish their creations, not everyone is on HN, and not everyone on HN is going to shout from the rooftops about how they are in that larger group of newly-enabled people.

Every new technology is going to also enable bad people, just like the Internet enabled scammers, it enabled a lot more people to be more productive.

Doubly so when you consider the history of every previous advance that was supposed to free people from the tyranny of needing a developer to make software, from COBOL forward. Some people indeed made their own applications, while everyone else rejected doing that and preferred to pay someone to do it for them.

Comparative advantage ("Is this the best use of my time?") is a real thing, and the human time to make and maintain non-trivial software will always itself be real.