alt Hacker News> I must admit that for a few days I felt very depressed about it all. Not about “AIs writing all the code” - that much is clear to me, and I do not lament the changing landscape of the craft
If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment. People coding on their own time won't be left behind. It's your own time to use as you like. And if you want to take a longer time to hand craft a library or your pet project, more power to you.
Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense. But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd. This also isn't true for all paid programming work and will continue not to be, despite the marketing hype.
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OP here - no, I am not under pressure to do vibe code for work, I do it willingly (but - IMO - responsibly). And I do not think hand-coding will be sustainable for most tasks simply because it will be very hard to justify in most situations where you work with other people - be it on community basis or commercially. It's hard to say "I have to spend a week doing this by hand" when the next person is expecting you to do this in an afternoon (and rightly so).
I think we should write code by hand from time to time to not lose currency - but it's not the primary nor the default anymore.
> But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd.
Unfortunately (?) this seems to be the ground truth for the majority of people I speak to. What's not clear to me yet, is whether we'll stop reading code. I suspect that reading is going away as well. There's a push at $WORK to expedite 50-files/20,000 line PRs via agentic reviews..
If this continues, then language readability and "pleasure" of hand coding will likely diminish. I'm still not clear where we're going to land with libraries and re-use. Non-technical pressures are forcing functionality to be re-vibe coded instead.
I've always loved Rails for its pragmatic approach; I've delivered many projects with it. I'll be sad when it disappears but it seems inevitable.
Maybe I'm a bad person for this, but I both love coding and designing abstractions, and I enjoy LLM use. It's like having my old college friends to argue with about whenever I want.
> If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment.
We don't necessarily like writing the code by hand, but those of us in this situation don't really have a choice and it pays the bills (handsomely, I might add; not complaining at all).
Every line of code has the entire organization behind it due to requirements that cannot budge an inch. There's also lots of rigorous manual testing beyond what is already automated. The automation efforts for this kind of software, sometimes going on decades, has left no stone unturned yet lots of human work (and payroll cost) remains.
This is what a real business looks like once it's settled into its competitive niche, and I'm routinely surprised how many devs on HN are not in this kind of role. Those people who are forced to lean hard on AI are at the highest risk of unemployment, and I have to assume they're either junior or made a lot of questionable career choices.
I wish I understood what goes on in the mind of people which today insist it's absurd to believe that LLMs can code, and that it's all marketing hype.
The strength of the Reality Distorsion Field would make the one of Steve Jobs pale in comparison.
> Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense
First, I offloaded the tedious. There was no real joy there. Then I offloaded the merely time consuming - after all I could have more fun on interesting problems.
But suddenly everything is too difficult, and I am not going to get any better at those pieces by glancing over ai prs. Still, this is what I do