alt Hacker News> I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it.
Gradually over its recent booming years, software work went from one of several practical engineering refuges for curious tinkers and puzzle-addicts to a career path for financially ambitious bright people akin to finance, law, or medicine.
Many people carrying a "software engineer" title now never really enjoyed that part of the work at all but were suitably clever and responsible to accomplish what modest ends they were tasked to by their very generous employers. Mostly (but not entirely), those people are the ones most eager to have AI agents shield them from rigorous design and puzzle work and enable them to leverage their innate cleverness more lazily. They never really internalized the coding and engineering principles of the industry and so can't foresee what might be down the road for them with this technique, especially when they're surrounded by peers with the same mindset.
> AI isn’t always faster.
It is when coding was an extremely frustrating and high friction experience for you in the first place, as is the case for many who work among us now.
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If there's one thing I've remarked, even before LLM tooling, is that there's a class of people that is ready to try things for weeks until it magically work (with no guarantee it will hold), instead of spending one hour designing it and formalizing it. They won't get functional abstraction, maintainability means nothing to them, and architecture don't matter.
They're the one copy-pasting straight from StackOverflow, and if it does not work, will copy-paste something over it. When something works, they will copy-paste it all over the codebase regardless of context.
For those people, LLM tooling are the Second Coming. Because it helps them eliminate all the telltale signs of bad works they've been doing. For them, "Use the AI" is the new mantra because they can't imagine not needing to use it.
100 times this. Maybe this was the thing all along that was so difficult to put our finger on for why some engineers seem to have "it" while so many others, despite being productive, don't. It's just that they loved it. It brings me so much sadness to see so many people happily relegate themselves to typists instead of a person with real motivations and skills.