Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP.
We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!
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.
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.
Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).
In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.
I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
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.
Indeed, the OP's point seems very focused on programmers enjoying programming. And that's a perfectly laudable goal, but obviously this then means that the goal is programmer enjoyment, satisfaction, etc. If the goal is code that allows the user to benefit while also being correct and secure, then that drastically changes the economics and hence potential solutions of what parts of the work should be done by a LLM agent and what parts of the work should be done by a human agent. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants; so what you want from code determines a great deal of how to get there with the greatest benefit and the least cost.
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.
This comment highly resonates with me. I strongly believe coding by hand (defined as an act of writing computer code in some programming language) is moreless obsolete. I.e. my skill to implement dijkstra or quicksort in 10 minutes at 1am in 10 different languages while being hangover/drunk is absolutely worthless now.
Software Engineering itself is more than just coding, the creative (and well engineering) part is still there.
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
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.
These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.
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?
You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
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.
It's like half the people have turned off their brain.
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.
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.
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
That's a great idea, I will try that too. The LLMs are so capable, but the slowness annoys me. I always end up working on a few things at once and always doing rounds of reading its output, giving new orders, and going back to Reddit/HN/YouTube while it's doing its thing for the next 5 minutes.
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."
OpenAI/Anthropic's marketing here reminds me of the way colonizers will exalt criminal groups in the regions they wish to dominate. Similarly, these AI firms have exalted a caste of lower-performing engineers who have been wreaking havoc with AI spam for the last few years. I'm not worried about losing my job and these people will become scapegoats when the bottom falls out.
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/
People other than you, I guess. I think your first chunk is a bit of an unfavorable perspective, but still I would take that over the second every time.
That's great for you, but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts. For many, many people, the things that are left are not the enjoyable ones. People have built hobbies and careers around doing something they love and its relevance is evaporating at an unprecedented rate.
but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts.
These posts are about saying "fuck you" to software developers. They're having fun making people scared but really they're just trying to reduce your market value.
I’m not sure which group you consider worst but LLMs already does both. I can only vouch for Opus 5.5. It just needs someone to tell it to do it that’s all. And I am the most anti AI person this post is targeted to.
I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months.
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
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 think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
It’s hard to build up trust in something that pretends to be much cleverer than yourself.
I think this point captures the crux of my struggle with LLMs. I want to let loose, but I don't trust the outcome. Will it make a dumb mistake? Will it make a smart implementation, that I won't understand 3 months from now? Am I building something that I will need an LLM to explain to be later? If so, I am perpetually dependent on this technology. That's fine if I can just take it anywhere I go and can own it. I have switched IDEs and Editors every few years, sometimes leaning into their "smartness", and sometimes completely stepping away from the "quality of life" features. But every time, I knew I will have it with me wherever and whenever I needed.
Depending on LLMs doesn't feel that way now. And that really makes me reluctant.
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.
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.
---
[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.
Thanks for sharing. It might also come down to whether we see programming as an end in itself or as a tool.
Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.
One thing I've been doing is to use it for:
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP. We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!
Pick something you always wanted to learn more about and use LLMs to help you
It just needs to be something where you can verify its information quickly enough.
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
Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).
In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.
I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.
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.
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.
Sure. Ultimately it's still you who is responsible for the code you ship I assume, no matter how it came about.
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.
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.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
I repeat for the millionth time, not everything is web dev.
This comment literally forced coffee through my nasal passageway as laughter erupted from my mouth.
Thank you.
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.
Indeed, there are many other more varied domains.
Indeed, the OP's point seems very focused on programmers enjoying programming. And that's a perfectly laudable goal, but obviously this then means that the goal is programmer enjoyment, satisfaction, etc. If the goal is code that allows the user to benefit while also being correct and secure, then that drastically changes the economics and hence potential solutions of what parts of the work should be done by a LLM agent and what parts of the work should be done by a human agent. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants; so what you want from code determines a great deal of how to get there with the greatest benefit and the least cost.
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"
Don't concede the "power tools" analogy. LLM are not capable of building maintainable software.
This comment highly resonates with me. I strongly believe coding by hand (defined as an act of writing computer code in some programming language) is moreless obsolete. I.e. my skill to implement dijkstra or quicksort in 10 minutes at 1am in 10 different languages while being hangover/drunk is absolutely worthless now. Software Engineering itself is more than just coding, the creative (and well engineering) part is still there.
I think it’s more analogous to view LLMs as taking steroids while not going to the gym.
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
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.
These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.
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?
You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
For tasks you don't want to do (such as work-related ones), use an LLM.
For tasks you enjoy, write them yourself.
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.
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.
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
That's a great idea, I will try that too. The LLMs are so capable, but the slowness annoys me. I always end up working on a few things at once and always doing rounds of reading its output, giving new orders, and going back to Reddit/HN/YouTube while it's doing its thing for the next 5 minutes.
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.
A lot of these AI guys seem pretty simple to me...
This sums up well the current zeitgeist, wow
OpenAI/Anthropic's marketing here reminds me of the way colonizers will exalt criminal groups in the regions they wish to dominate. Similarly, these AI firms have exalted a caste of lower-performing engineers who have been wreaking havoc with AI spam for the last few years. I'm not worried about losing my job and these people will become scapegoats when the bottom falls out.
I'm enjoying building more apps, one of my app is zyvop.com
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).
It sounds like this message isn’t for you then?
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/
Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.
I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.
People other than you, I guess. I think your first chunk is a bit of an unfavorable perspective, but still I would take that over the second every time.
That's great for you, but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts. For many, many people, the things that are left are not the enjoyable ones. People have built hobbies and careers around doing something they love and its relevance is evaporating at an unprecedented rate.
These posts are about saying "fuck you" to software developers. They're having fun making people scared but really they're just trying to reduce your market value.
I’m not sure which group you consider worst but LLMs already does both. I can only vouch for Opus 5.5. It just needs someone to tell it to do it that’s all. And I am the most anti AI person this post is targeted to.
It really does seem like the target audience of LLM users are people who never learned to use Vim.
Why would anyone pay you to work for them if you aren't willing to do these things? This is the entire job.
I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months.
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
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.
What product do you make?
I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
I think this point captures the crux of my struggle with LLMs. I want to let loose, but I don't trust the outcome. Will it make a dumb mistake? Will it make a smart implementation, that I won't understand 3 months from now? Am I building something that I will need an LLM to explain to be later? If so, I am perpetually dependent on this technology. That's fine if I can just take it anywhere I go and can own it. I have switched IDEs and Editors every few years, sometimes leaning into their "smartness", and sometimes completely stepping away from the "quality of life" features. But every time, I knew I will have it with me wherever and whenever I needed.
Depending on LLMs doesn't feel that way now. And that really makes me reluctant.
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.
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.
Thank you for blessing us with your presence, sir.