Pick something you always wanted to learn more about and use LLMs to help you

After programming for 40 years, my brain has many language parsers. But languages and interfaces and classes evolve and it been a huge productivity boost the use LLMs for coding.

I use AI like StackOverflow on steroids. And like using stackoverflow, I do it in a browser and I don't let the LLM touch my code.

I, personally, love programming more than ever!

Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.

I dont have bandwidth to check ai made code

that's okay! nobody had the bandwidth to check compiler generated machine code either so we just stopped doing it

Its a false premise so often repeated. I am really tired. Compilers are ruleset: If you pass it one statement it'll produce the same output all the time. Its easy to verify it works. And if enough people have used it before and found no problems, there probably aren't many. Spoiler: People always find niche bugs.

But an LLM will generate you two completely different things today and tomorrow. Heck, even if you stash its changes and redo the same prompt.

They are NOT comparable at all.

Even though I disagree with (when I worked on CUDA at nvidia if I ran the TOT compiler on the same shaders one day and the next they could often change), the point is not to compare the two things side by side. It's just to say there are lots of times in life where for whatever reason we can give up old jobs.

I find mostly what I do is think about how to improve the product, what the user wants, and what information the LLM needs and how to get it into the context window.

It's over. LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours.

Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.

So what are people like me, who fall into "some values of no one" supposed to do?

I guess just blow my brains out? Just.. Thanks for trying man, but you picked the wrong thing to specialize in, now you're completely redundant and worthless to society. Here's your cyanide pill?

God damn I'm so bitter about all of this. I was doing so well for a bit now I feel like I've completely wasted my life.

LLMs can produce some incredible bloated and convoluted pieces of code if one isn't careful. Even to the point LLMs become useless. Blindly using these 'powertools' is a recipe for disaster.

We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.

Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software:

https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...

Assuming the code is produced to serve human needs there will be humans in the loop somewhere. Not nearly as many as before and not in the same roles but they will be there

The advent of the Spinning Jenny, water frame and power loom (etc.) changed textile manufacturing for good and made the end result so cheap that it is now seen as disposable. There are still some people in the loop controlling the machines but not nearly as many as before and also not really the same people since it takes a different skill set to keep a textile production line running than it takes to spin and weave.

The same is true for the advent of the phototypesetting machine (Linotype etc.) and the offset press which irreversibly changed print production. There are still people in the loop but not nearly as many and with a different skill set.

Now what about the "Coding Johnny"?

Generative models are now doing the same to coders, irreversibly changing the software production process. There will be far fewer people involved and those people will have a different skill set. Software will become disposable, more like RNA then DNA, if the specifications change the Coding Johnny will churn out a new version.

Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.

There is plenty of historical precedent for machines replacing professions. You could read what those people did and how well it worked.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it never worked out great for many of those people regardless of what they did.

That is kind of my point.

This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.

I repeat for the millionth time, not everything is web dev.

Are no one using these models outside web?

Of course they are, but the quote "LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours" is more true there than in other domains. "Any concept" is the most laughable.

it can not not? moreover, it can totally ruin existing invariants, introduce dead code, falsify tests and sabotage further work by poisoning comments and documentation in a few hours.

Power tools cannot "produce any house in hours"

I think it’s more analogous to view LLMs as taking steroids while not going to the gym.

I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.

Is it really that hard to understand?

Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.

Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.

How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?

I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.

[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.

I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.

Valued by whom? The market? Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing. They do it for the love of it. If something's only worth doing when someone pays a premium for it, boy, you're in for a hard time.

Valued by whom? The market?

No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.

It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.

Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing

Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.

I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.

I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.

What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.

Yeah same here. I feel like I’ve been promoted and not get to manage my own very efficient team that needs a lot of micromanaging. I’ve seen what other people have made without any experience, but I personally feel like I can get my vision done much, much faster, and like I’m not so encumbered by how long it might take to implement some small feature.

In fairness though I never really enjoyed programming for the sake of it, I was always about what you’re getting at the end.

I feel like I’ve been promoted

The correct response to "I feel I have been promoted (without a corresponding title or pay change)" is to be pissed off, not excited

Why would you want to be pissed off when you could be excited?

This is great for personal projects, but at work chances are someone will have completely rewritten/refactored/rearchitected everything I'd built up a good mental model of next time I blinked.

Yeah, further reducing emotional attachment to code at work is a yet another benefit of LLMs.

Wow, I had never considered it, but it really seems like a huge benefit that all implementations in the company codebase are now perpetually refactored.

I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.

Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code

While reading "The Nemesis of Creativity"

It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:

"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."

It resonates with me similarly as the post.

This sums up well the current zeitgeist, wow

  Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account?

I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.

Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.

And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.

LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).

Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code

Me? I enjoy that stuff for what it is. Reviewing code is definitely not the truly enjoyable thing. Writing code, expressing my logic in code. That is enjoyable to me.

But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.

/yes I know a coding language is 100% better at expressing algorithmical logic, but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate. machines do that way better/

But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.

Skill issue.

But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.

Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.

And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten

1. Review what it writes as it writes it

2. Give it a smaller, more focused, scope to make changes

Or, keep vibing but then don't get mad about it.

Oh, if I had the ability to do these things, agents would be much nicer to use.

Sadly, at my current company, this doesn't seem to be acceptable practice.

And I'm sure elevator operators stood pressing buttons long after they didn't need to...

We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.

There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.

It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.

It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.

The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.

I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.

Who likes typing code

It really does seem like the target audience of LLM users are people who never learned to use Vim.

And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs.

Why would anyone pay you to work for them if you aren't willing to do these things? This is the entire job.

Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.

I, for one, liked it. I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer because, for all the downsides, I actually enjoyed working with code so closely. It really allowed me to learn and know the code that I wrote.

Whenever I'm using LLMs for code generation, the one huge downside I notice, is that even if I review everything line by line, I don't get the same "I know precisely how it works, because I wrote it" feeling.

I really wonder what the implications of this will be. For instance, if the young devs who are just entering the field will actually be able to write code on their own? Or maybe it will truly not be needed a few years from now?

I'm with you. During most of my career, I was considered very technical and a good coder, but I never really loved the slowness of it. I enjoyed designing solutions but found "putting them into code" tiresome because for me the fun is in actually solving the problem.

But it's clear that many people feel otherwise. Software engineering has many classes of tasks and the difference in opinions about AI seem to exist because different people like different aspects of it.

Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.

Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.

I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.

What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.

And who likes ... reviewing code

I was with you on your second list until this part. It feels like a poison pill rider that's added to a bill in Congress, because I've always found code review to be the single most soul-sucking aspect of the job.

I'll grant that may be at least partially due to poor practices at the places I've worked, but semi-regularly having large PRs that take hours to comb through and where you either rubber-stamp it or look like the bad guy (because you're retarding release velocity) has never been particularly fulfilling.

It’s very clear AI writes great code and will even review it for bugs much better and faster than a human can. With cloud agents like Devin, you can spawn an army of these agents at a moments notice. Teams who figure out how to do this will simply out compete any teams who don’t.

Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.

I’ve been experimenting with this idea that I can implement features faster and more accurately than the big model + agent swarm paradigm. I also have been trying this because of what the post brings up when it comes to AI burnout.

For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.

When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.

Sounds like you could just use an autocomplete model for the exact same benefit.

And that's not a criticism, that's what I've come back to myself.

I have been programming for 25+ years and the last year has been the most fun because every single useless-for-everyone-but-me idea ... I could spend a few hours on and get it working. Did 30-40 different small projects this year.[1] Mostly used by me (and some by a couple of friends).

I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.

Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.

I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.

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[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.

People are comparing this to tech automating wood work, knitting, baking etc. That comparison is fundamentally flawed.

You still needed to know how to operate those machines. Where to begin, when to do what. Know what’s right and what’s wrong. They are just tools.

Something like claude desktop can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform contrary to popular opinion. These harnesses are getting that good.

Only reason people don’t do that is because they are intimidated. Regular people don’t even understand file systems. As soon as an Apple-like version of claude code exists that intimidation will be gone.

I have been writing code for 14 years now and everything I learned from my failures and successes someone else can get for free. Even newer paradigms these LLM’s can dream up.

Its the democratisation, of that foundation people put so much effort building is what pissed off everyone here. Including myself I’ll admit.

Results of all these years of hard earned knowledge are accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.

I use claude code at work, even for architectural decisions it can iterate small prototypes to validate. I still read code because I am old school but it can replace most people.

years of hard earned knowledge is accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.

Isn't this like saying "any one can paint now because every one have a camera?"..

That’s why I added “Results of” that knowledge in front of it. :)

But to be honest, an llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher who can conjure multiple examples if they ask it what was just written. I have seen people out of my field use terms only someone actively working in it would know.

Most people live without knowing how their cars, fuels, medicine, phones work anyways.

I've avoided using LLMs. You might not have the option of doing this in paid employment, but you certainly can in your spare time, and if you don't you'll gradually lose the ability to think in a programming language. This applies similarly to any other cognitive skill too: writing music or playing a musical instrument, speaking and reading a foreign language, doing cryptic crosswords, playing chess or go, etc. You wouldn't stop playing chess just because computers are now much better at it. The point is learn, understand, and do those things yourself.

Here's my advice, based on what I have done: implement a programming language yourself, from scratch, without using an LLM, and then program in that. Don't release your implementation, or any code you've written in it.

Most (almost all) of my programming at home has been done in a Lisp dialect I designed and wrote myself, which is superficially similar to Common Lisp, but with subtle differences, including some deficiencies that I have to work around. And in my Lisp dialect, I implemented a visual dataflow language. Code samples are on my web site, but they're PNG images, so are safe from LLMs (I think). The language was designed to run on MIMD hardware, which doesn't exist in the real world. I've also implemented a Prolog which doesn't use Edinburgh syntax, which I use for type checking, and for parsing a controlled English implementation. So the temptation, and also the option, of using an LLM was never there.

In the course of doing all this, I've learned a lot along the way, which I wouldn't have if I'd used an LLM.

this is awesome, but also code samples being in PNG images does not make them safe from LLMs anymore unfortunately, LLMs are really good at reading text from images now

One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.

I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.

But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.

But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.

And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.

Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.

Just be careful how you use it.