alt Hacker NewsI do not mourn.
For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.
When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.
When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.
Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.
Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.
It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.
Replies
I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output.
If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature.
That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts.
But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.
>It was, for me, never about the code.
Then it wasn't your craft.
I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting.
Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative.
Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?
Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things.
This new world makes me more effective at it.
And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.
> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.
For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?
Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?
I want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.
Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound?
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the process of creating for the immediacy of having. It's paying someone to make for you.
Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.
AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.
So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process.
It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!"
I mean sure yeah but also not really.
In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control.
To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.
But why would someone pay you for that?
So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster.
To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them.
Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.
I couldn't agree more.
If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.
Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.
This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
[dead]
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much.
I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".
But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)
My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.