>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

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20k 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code

The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering

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asanineassasin 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is some truth to that, thus i wonder, if they will not solve that by creating architectural harnesses. Like look at repo x. Condense its coding style and architecture into a prompt. Remember that prompt everytime you create a new module.

But i get where you sre coming from

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tonyhart7 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with your take if we talking about large complex industrial software

but guess what ???? most software don't

Timmy don't need to understand how landing page works in order to sell his cookie startup online

see where I am going ???? You are not get replaced

AI just replace people that work in "dirty and crude" work, think of its like wordpress plugin fixer from third world country

this is part of industry that you never touch and not want to work

	▲	mrheosuper 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>"dirty and crude" work Which is what we used to tell the junior to do.
	▲	a57721 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It only remains to explain this to the management... That does not work with code, engages with AI only in the form of chatbots, but demands everything to be "AI native" and won't be there to deal with the consequences.

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snohobro 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.

However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.

It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.

I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.

But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.

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jackb4040 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.

It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.

I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

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ern 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know if it's just me, but I find that with a disciplined approach (or even an undisciplined one for some personal projects), LLM generated code is quite "maintainable" nowadays for the sorts of things that matter: adding new functionality, fixing the odd bug (usually a missed edge case, or behavior I didn't think-through well enough). They're also secure enough for me not to be overly concerned.

Granted, I stick to frontier models and avoid cheaper ones, but if it quacks like a duck...

	▲	zanderwohl 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you're working on a CRUD/web app, absolutely. There's so much data for web apps out there that LLMs now produce better web app code than most of my coworkers from 2022 or so, since it follows consistent style rules. Web app code all looks the same, anyway.

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batshit_beaver 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

The problem we’re collectively running into is that nobody knows if this actually poses a problem anymore. We’ll find out in 5-10 years, but businesses and clients can’t wait that long.

As a side note, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the “management” for setting expectations around AI use. They’re driven by market forces. If competitors are producing slop and customers are gobbling it up, then from a business perspective it _is_ a mistake to abstain from AI use.

What I’m finding quite fascinating is that we’re in a weird spot right now where we’re both expected to produce slop AND understand it / be responsible for it. Seems unreasonable.

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goosejuice 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.

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

Just yesterday I got a fully LLM reply from a coworker about an issue.

I've never been the biggest hobbyist programmer. My hobby programming was a means to an end for the actual hobby project I wanted to use. I'm more of a "maker" than any one kind of engineer. That being said, it was still fun at times and those personal projects literally got me jobs and allowed me to bypass live programming tests because I was able to show I knew how to program as I explained every design decision.

LLMs sorta fucked me over. My strongest skills aren't raw programming knowledge or fact regurgitation. Personal projects were how I showed potential employers my actual end-to-end problem solving. The projects were never polished, they didn't have every error condition formally handled in a logging framework. But they organized ideas into data and made things happen.

All that is worthless now unless employers want to see my pre-war steel collection on old repos. I'm defeated. Using agents for personal projects feels like playing a game with all the cheat codes turned on. It stops being a game, it's pointless. Me telling the machine to make something doesn't prove anything.

I still want to remain housed into my senior years and this tech has possibly kicked that out from under me.

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donatj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming.

At least two people I've worked with have become "AI Influencers" on social media. They were two of the least capable programmers I had ever worked with. Both super nice people, and I enjoyed their company, but both generated absolutely terrible code.

I think there's generally something to people who were sidelined by their lack of skill feeling empowered by AI.

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bah9 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hard agree. My anecdotal experience: me and my friend group have math/coding contest national level background. We loved coding. All of us now devastated and consider retirement/different profession People who was there for the benefits (no offense, pretty valid reason) are happy now

I declined manager position multiple times, now I am forced to it

And no, I can't code without agents as a hobby anymore. As a rational person, I feel like this is just useless nowdays. Huge part of the fulfilment that it was the most optimal way to solve the problem. Now I feel like I do useless work

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latentsea 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

I think I know people in both camps who feel both ways. I'd say it's all just noise at this point. What's clear is some people like it (for now) and some people don't (and probably won't ever). I've gone from liking it to not over the course of the last year. I used to love programming/the craft, and then got burnt out of it, so I loved it because it made building things easier again after I stopped caring about that, and then it made work hellish when everyone basically stopped caring about the craft at all.

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calebkaiser 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel for everyone in this situation. I don't think anyone is wrong to mourn the undeniably massive shift happening to something that has been such a big part of our lives, and I don't think anyone is wrong to be excited. I say this as someone who has worked in ML for coming up on 10 years now and is more towards the latter camp, where I love working with agents, and still spend plenty of time writing code by hand and studying. I don't think it's fair to pretend people are being unreasonable or are just "missing the big picture" for being unhappy.

But I also have found that where you work and what AI usage is like in your company is a pretty big deciding factor. Your comment, which I agree with, made me think about this. I consult a decent amount, and I've worked with companies where the engineering culture has adopted AI in a way I describe as "ugly." I should find a better word. But what I mean is that it's sort of like the attitude is "okay, now we can ship more tickets, so everyone take on 8x the workload". And they do a lot of "best practice" kind of stuff around using coding agents--every new anthropic article gets posted to slack, and there's always a new CI process for using agents--but they're fundamentally just trying to do the same work as before but kinda sorta faster. It's a weirdly miserable experience.

On the other hand, I've worked with companies where the engineering culture almost feels exuberant. I think a consistent difference is that in these companies, it feels like the engineers now have permission to try wildly ambitious things. It's not always optimally productive in the sense that more things get thrown away or end up just not really working out, but overall they move significantly faster and do more interesting work. Commonly, it's things they wanted to do before, but simply weren't realistic with their constraints around capacity. Or it's an idea like "this part of the codebase has always been a performance nightmare, but it's also a beast to untangle. I wonder if I could setup an autoresearch loop and let it run all day, even just to harvest some ideas?"

But yeah, when everyone sort of gives up and/or are forced to move an ungodly number of smaller tickets, it is a miserable time.

	▲	latentsea an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I definitely know what you mean about the difference in engineering culture. I'm definitely the kind to get excited by it and try out all manner of experiments and really have my head in the game on the new paradigm. My current team just isn't in that same wavelength. It's a lot more practical focus on shipping, and fair enough. It's a bit of an impedence mismatch for sure. Still, I have fun playing around with stuff in the evenings at home, but now at work I'm just trying to do bog-standard engineering and forget about the AI side of it to the degree that I can.

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verdverm 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel the opposite, pushing keys was never the enjoyable part, deciding what types go in what places, uninteresting, switching between editor and terminal, boring at best, trying to translate errors to SO search queries and back again, maybe possible, dealing with under-documented dependencies, frustrating.

My goal has always been to create something and use it. Ai still requires we do the intellectual side of programming, that interesting side of programming. I get to do more of that now that while the bot handles that annoying stuff. I'm a the happiest programmer I have ever been. I spend more time writing human these days, because the bots are really bad at that.