I always find so much cognitive dissonance in these kinds of posts.

> My most successful work this year was hand-writing a tool, replacing ~4,000 lines of vibe-code with a few hundred. My system has proven more flexible, easier to test, and more generalizable than what it replaced.

> agents still need human taste and experience to produce good work.

Where do you think human taste and experience in software comes from?

> overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.

> for many of us, honing the code, finding the right design, seeing the parts mesh together — that was the meditative purpose we found in our jobs.

> That’s not the only time AI waylaid me. LLMs could not figure out how to annotate that model’s training data correctly. I spent days going back and forth with them

> LLMs are not yet good companions when brainstorming complicated things.

Why do we expect this to get better? The training data will degrade in quality if more people rely on LLMs so I'd expect models to eventually start getting worse even if they currently enjoy apparent improvements in output.

> Writing code is solved.

What a strange thing to say given all the above experiences, which I think we all share.

Why are we willing to give up so much in terms of purpose and understanding for perceived productivity gains?

>> Writing code is solved

This always reads like “writing english is solved” just because you collected snippets of famous works and have built a spell corrector.

Code is written to process data. The struggle was never to learn programming syntax (most grammar are only a few page long). The main struggle was that it’s hard to model a domain into an information system, identifying the components and their relationships, what is ingested, and what needs to be output.

Computers have integers and floats, but you need to implement units like distance, money, various counts,… The real world have words and sentences, but that needs encoding like ascii and unicode as well as the “string” concepts to make it work. Take HN, I’d bet that if you can model it in terms of data, writing code is not an issue.