Fuck it, make it anyway

AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.

What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.

I stopped reviewing the code at all.

People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.

My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.

I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.

It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.

1. Things I enjoy doing.

2. Things I am good at doing.

3. Things people value me doing.

The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.

The world isn't going to change back, so our task is to figure out the new intersection. This is always hard work, and I have no easy answers.

From the article:

>I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things

Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software engineers for eliminating entire industries?

Folks, writing software can be fun and satisfying. Do it for the enjoyment. But suck it up, because the technology wave you rode to a well-paying job was always going to be short-lived for the majority of programmers.

Just like the engineers who built steam engines, or living room radios, or tube TV's, or Internet dial-up modems and long distance phone networks, or whatever other technology that has come and gone: just move on, because you helped to put those people out of work--and they moved on.

You're going to drive yourselves crazy with the constant re-hashing and sobbing over the obvious changes that are happening. Figure out how you go forward and start going forward.

This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.

The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility in software, precisely because some of the final form necessarily a cognitive 50% grey, even just for interoperability alone.

The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.

OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”

The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.

That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.

You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.

I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.

So much this.

I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM.

It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.

If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.

Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.

Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.

I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.

But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods.

We have an automatic reviewer as well and there wasn't even a peep from it regarding any of that.

And this is really the crux of the issue - LLMs won't ever create elegant and minimal code, because their style is based on the mean, which in turn is dominated by the work of people who shit out a lot of working, but write-only code.

From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.

The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.

The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.

I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.

LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.

I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.

I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.

Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.

But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.

That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.

If you don't care about programming but just problem solving...or you think all of this is irrelevant to "the customer" then AI might make you happy.

Can you imagine, for example, if Tolkien (insert favorite writer here) had to get AI to write Lord of the Rings for him: what would happen? How would he get it to express his idea? In order to make money he could just describe a few ways of expressing things and outline his plot and ..... wham. He could then make it write an Icosology (series of 20 books - I had to look it up) and we'd all be so happy right?

The fantasy genre that followed LoTR is almost like that! :-)

I don't love control so much that I want to write in assembler and I don't like it so little that I want to make everything by effectively trying to tell someone else how to do it for me and finding that they just don't understand. I think the expression of the idea matters sometimes much more than even the idea and since words are not 100% effective at communicating ideas any language based description is going to be a lot of effort.

So like everyone else I use it but for things I don't care about - things which are a stepping stone to something else. I also use it for things I don't understand and I feel delightfully empowered at how something super hard turned out easy....until it doesn't work properly.

Some people make things from a pragmatic standpoint - they need a solution in a space where the existing solutions don't fit for some reason, and they decide to make their own. This is, I think, the majority of generative AI coding. A solution needs to be filled, and even if you are an amazing coder, for most of the solution space, AI is going to be faster than you. Your code might be more elegant, but not every problem requires elegance. Sometimes, it just needs to work.

Other people do it for the love of the game. The enjoy solving problems, crafting code, and finding optimum and elegant solutions to problems. This isn't pragmatism, or even close. It's craftwork by masters, or apprentices who want to be masters, and they wouldn't use AI to produce the work any more than they'd ask another human to do it - that would be cross purposes to their goal, which is to do the making.

Both are valid and there should be no shame in either, but I think people confuse the two and the disparity between them causes friction. When you judge a person's work in one paradigm by the other, you're bound to offend and distress them.

Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.

Give it a go!

A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013

If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.

Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.

If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.

I suppose you can balance between using them if the paycheck job is asking for them, and enjoy your craft outside your 9-5.

I’ve been reading more and more of this tone, and I do wonder what those devs writing these blogs do and where do they work. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years, and the challenge was never the cording, it was always the human communication and understanding the outcome.

Yes LLMs can help none devs create things now, but show me a company that will allow AI generated code by none devs to go to prod.

You want to talk about fulfillment in our jobs like that is still the top line item to businesses. This is not the 90s anymore. Nobody is pretending software is supposed to be fulfilling anymore. It's a paycheck.

It reinforced in my head this idea that hobby programming is entering its "sports" or "running" era.

Consider the modern jogging enthusiast. They buy Nike shoes that make it really easy to run long distances, specialized clothing, fancy water bottles. They find spots to drive to and park at before getting out and running downhill for a few miles, getting picked up at the bottom by one of their friends. Stuff that makes for a great social media post.

They do the hard part of running, but curated to just the parts that they enjoy. They drive the rest of the time and when they do run, it looks nothing like the first marathon run of ancient Greece.

It sounds nice and all to talk about "I'm going to code anyway," but when I did this I found that there are always parts of the coding that I really really never did want to do and that I'm happy to just outsource to my agent like the jogger outsources getting to the top with their car. Testing, writing docs, making the readme logo. Stuff that probably wouldn't have happened without the AI but that I'm glad exists.

1: https://GitHub.com/djha-skin/janver

Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.

At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.

Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.

I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.

I'm basically looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.

Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.

In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.

I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.

https://art.joeldare.com

On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.

I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.

The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.

https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box

Those who are driven by Eros want to enjoy the duration of a process: to have a delicious meal, make love, plant and care for that tree, build that house, and live.

The adepts of Thanatos want things done right now: to get satiated, have an orgasm, shade away that damn Sun, cover their sorry asses from elements, and die.

The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.

Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.

It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.

I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.

For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.

Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.

And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.

Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.

There is plenty of others, but the idea of being post-scarcity of information creation/software seems akin to how Star Trek had replicators. They used them for sure, but there was still people who wanted to cook/create by hand, as an expression.

What companies can do is restrict the usage to certain fields and keep the others immune. This should be universal so the competition exists where it should.

And so it will be with software. And just as autos are more complicated than feeding an animal, ai generated code will be complex,less understandable and more prone to failures.

If the pc is a bicycle for the mind, ai is its self driving tesla

It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.

Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.

Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.

Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.

Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.

Why should I be measured by how well I do things. In fact do we think human value can be measured at all?

Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.

It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.

99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.

I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.

the common thread in similar post is that some folks are struggling with _feelings_ and nothing more. valid feelings set off by real and major changes to the very ground they stand on, I guess, but these feelings are ultimately distractions that can paralysis.

The other common thread is these folks are obviously smarter and more accomplished than I am by magnitudes and they're the first ones I'd expect to pull smart (maybe even inspiring) pivots

And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!

We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.

So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…

Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.

Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."

Them: "But I like writing code!"

Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.

Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.

Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.

None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.

I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.

For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.

But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).

You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.

I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.

Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:

It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.

And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.

That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.

So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.

Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.

  The reason for this is, I guess, all too familiar for anyone in a creative field: surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers, chewed up and regurgitated back to us like a mother feeding a baby bird with a subscription model. I have some hope for my friends in other artistic fields; AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.

Traditional art is still valued. Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. And even some bad AI art is actually a good idea that needs a few talented friends to make happen traditionally - but no one would ever see the vision without the terrible AI rough draft. There is room for all of it, and I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol.

And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize; the people who want to replace you with AI will replace you with cheap outsourced labor instead, if you let them. AI isn't the problem.

So yes, fuck it, make it anyway, so that you can continue to exist and provide the communicative, engineering, and reasoning value that others still need from you.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?RavioliCode

I can't see how the tinkerers of the world who make unremarkable software expect to be pat on the back for making not very useful things. It's almost selfish in a way - just because you enjoy the process of creation doesn't mean that you should be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, nobody cares. If you do, great, but that's just you.

Basket weavers don't expect their baskets to be valuable to the world in a major way, so why should a tinkerer who spent 150 hours on a git branch switcher get to feel the opposite?

The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.

I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.

Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.

Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.

That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).

Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.

It sucks but it is what it is, if you still like programming by hand (I enjoy doing leetcode) then go ahead and do it. Find some other value, if your identity in life was tied to being able to program then you likely have other issues.

It is one thing to have compassion for artists as their livelihoods become threatened, but this sort of rhetoric makes me think the writer is too blinded by their emotions to have an accurate opinion of the current state of image gen. Much of what can be produced by eg. the openai's image 2.5 model is more-or-less indistinguishable from a person's work.

It's also ironic how the "every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years" sentence applies to author of the article as well. The ego, luddism, and fear of change is real.

Back then, you plugged in a computer and got, typically a C:> prompt, this strange thing nobody had seen before. There was a big hype cycle, and the basic thinking of clients was infused with tremendous FOMO. I was immediately hired mostly because I wasn't afraid of computers. Often the attitude was almost like, "here's a wheelbarrow full of money and blank slate, write me some -- what do you call it -- software for my business so I can participate in this. No, I don't know what it has to do, you figure it out". I mean it was literally low hanging fruit everywhere.

Fast forward 43 years, and relative to THAT, most ordinary mortals are very computer literate, they often feel they have paid too much $$ for too long to people like me, and they think they fully understand the problem space and how to manage devs, while mostly neither of those things are really true.

Still, I have managed to specialize and select the right clients such that I still have tremendous freedom to use my best judgment while being very well compensated. In fact my present client has the attitude, "of course, don't use AI, why would you do that?" although admittedly I'm afraid to fully understand how they came by such a sanguine, hype-proof attitude.

My guess is that I'm one of a half dozen senior people in a pool of about a half dozen industry players in a very specialized fintech field, and I've built whole systems of the type they want twice before, my reputation precedes me, and they want a steady hand to bring those capabilities to them as well -- so whatever I want, is fine by them. Also they play the long game very well.

But even I feel obligated to periodically educate them about LLMs (I refuse to use the term "AIs") and my thinking about them, to sort of inoculate them from the almost inconceivably epic levels of hype around the topic. Fortunately they see the results from my labors that they are looking for, and don't want to disturb that.

And even I have a quantized open weight model hogging RAM on my local hardware where I can figure out if it's useful for anything (I'm looking at unit testing and prototyping mostly). This also gets around my environmental, security / privacy and ethical concerns about using cloud models.

But like many commenters here, I need to be able to substantially "own" / stand behind / understand my code or the meaning just leaches out of it for me.

Ultimately I don't feel the least bit of competition from LLMs in terms of understanding the problem spaces that I have a truly intimate knowledge / experience of, because what I bring to the table is UNDERSTANDING, which is something no LLM has. It only has probabilistic associations and chutzpah.

I think this is true for a lot of us, but it's just going to take a few more months or (dog help us!) a couple of years for the hype cycle to die down and for people to realize there's mostly no real value-added after you pay for all the token costs and data center downsides; rather, we've just been moving the pain points around. The music will quit playing, the investment dollars will dry up, and much (not all) of this will be yet another Cautionary Tale of hubris and overreach.

I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out.

Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage.

But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.

Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.

I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think.

I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.

No matter how good AI gets, I believe I will always program by hand to some degree. I really enjoy the activity, and most of all, I have enjoyed the learning and composition aspect. Programming by hand might not be useful, but like most hobbies, that does not really matter at the end of the day.

I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.

My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??

Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.

Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).

I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.

I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.

So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.

There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.

I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.

I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.

Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.

Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.

And it’s awesome.

It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.

With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.

Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.

Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.

If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.

And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.

The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.

Tons of opportunity at every corner.

Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.

> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years

Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.

> peer pressure is very real

Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.

> even disregarding all the environmental

The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.

> It isn’t fun for me

I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.

> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day

I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!

> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time

Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.

> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI

That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?

> there are only really three paths open to me

This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.

I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!

But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.

I don't like AI, but AI generated images have use cases. For instance, if you program a browser game but you lack human artists. Then AI generated images can be useful. Many of these images suck and feel misplaced, but some are quite nice, so I don't think it applies to all of AI generated content.

An art analogy:

Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.

If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.

The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.

Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.

For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.

This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.

And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.

The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.

Edit:

The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.

I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.

That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.

Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.

I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.

How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?

Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.

As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.

I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.

What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?

Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?

There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.

Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.

I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.

Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.

I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.

We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.

If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.

Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.

"So do we finally resolve the issues of ecocide, genocides, pandemic, and mass systems of oppression?...

Or do we build another advancement of tech foote these hells to capture?

Remember: making the second thing will likely take us way closer to extinction."

"Which makes more money?"

"The first path likely kills money as we know it, so there's no comparison. Making the second one makes more money in the short term, but then extinction."

"Fuck it, make it anyway"

It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!

On the (well written!) post's particulars:

I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).

But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.

Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.

Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.

*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.

Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:

https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake)

https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade

https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/

https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know)

https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz

https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com

https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version)

https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/

https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web

https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/

https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP)

https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol)

https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web

https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream

https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream