alt Hacker NewsThe more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is.
Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous.
As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps to safely run in an iframe sandbox inside a larger application.
Just understanding why that's a useful thing that can be built requires deep knowledge of sandboxing, security threats, browser security models, and half a dozen different platform features that have been evolving over a couple of decades.
A vibe coded without that technical understanding would have zero chance of prompting such a thing into existence, no matter how much guidance the LLMs gave them.
It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable.
Replies
I can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building (for what else?). I’ll just fade somewhat gradually into unemployment, I imagine.
> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable.
1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets things wrong. I don't like any of this, it's awful and I would never have gone into this field if someone had told me that it would be like this one day.
2. I cannot condone the means by which these tools were created, which is, as far as I am concerned, theft. I think it's unethical to use them at all, because they were created unethically. I dislike using stolen work, I think it's wrong, and I think everyone who uses it is making the world worse and normalizing theft. If continuing in my career means that I have to compromise my ethics, I wouldn't do it even if I loved this stuff, and see point (1).
3. Is anyone going to pay me more for my "more valuable" skills? Doesn't seem like it, engineering salaries on the whole are going down right now. You can believe they'll go up eventually if you like, but there's no evidence that will happen, or that it's happening. If my employer captures all the value, why should I care whether I'm creating more of it?