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Fuck it, make it anyway

Comments (210)

DidntUseIt
Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good.With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.Tons of opportunity at every corner.
MachineMan
In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are.AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
x3haloed
This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change.The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
user43928
I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally.Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.I stopped reviewing the code at all.People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
Tade0
I use LLMs at work. I'm expected to and paid to show up and do that, so I do it.But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods.We have an automatic reviewer as well and there wasn't even a peep from it regarding any of that.And this is really the crux of the issue - LLMs won't ever create elegant and minimal code, because their style is based on the mean, which in turn is dominated by the work of people who shit out a lot of working, but write-only code.
dofm
This.This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility.
blahgeek
There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby.Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
timcobb
My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now.I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
goonersallofyou
> the output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces.So much this.I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM.It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.
sicktriple
Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me?If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
saejox
Art for art's sake, did not work for me.I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
temac
I spend so much more time with generative IA thinking and iterating over design details (or even overall design) than before, when part was consumed by writing the implementation. Bots are often terrible and/or don’t have all your requirements available on this subject, or even your are discovering them along the way and you don’t all the time want the recommendation of the machine.From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
rikroots
I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
codazoda
This is timely for me.Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.https://art.joeldare.comOn the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box
navane
In this thread: people who automate jobs away lament their jobs being automated away
CuriouslyC
This article's note about game making 100% wrong, games are highly "complex" and there's a lot of iterative refinement and experimentation that is involved in "finding the fun." You can't just throw a pot of well liked mechanics together, because without balance or the right context it'll be flat. Also, unlike music where people often like something that's mostly derivative with some slight stylistic tweaks, if a game is derivative people will just keep playing the thing it's derived from.The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
Aeolun
Since I am currently using AI to make a game engine, I feel like I am sort of qualified to say something on the topic, and I don’t think it’s really true that AI’s can just roll one out without a lot of poking. They constantly go off on the wrong track and I have no faith that they’d get anywhere sensible without a human steering the whole thing (for now anyway).But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.
el1s7
It's kinda reassuring to see that a lot of devs feel this way.A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013
ChrisMarshallNY
For the last couple of years, I've been crafting and shipping a free app that Serves a particular narrow demographic. It works extremely well, but is a native iOS app (I don't write Android). When I first developed it, I worked with a professional graphic designer, and the app has a unique UX. In fact, with the latest release, I had to "walk back" a bit of the stuff the designer did, as I believe it interfered with usability. It's really a pretty intense app. There's a lot of moving parts. It handles user data, so I have to make sure it's secure and high-Quality.Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.I'm basically looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
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gandhiandy69
I love how LLMs transformed my daily routine at work. So far I have more time coding what I want and get paid for it while Claude writes the boring Spring 2 Crud for me.
Kuyawa
"I am making shoes with a hammer and some leather but this Nike shop just opened next to me and got me nervous, let's see what the future holds for me, I'll keep hammering nails to this sole as pure artisans do..."
tolerance
Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
RivieraKid
There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
molteanu
I've only found one answer to the "creative work" struggle now, after code writing as an art seems to have died.Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.Give it a go!
LastTrain
This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
weatherlite
Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.
prplfsh
Maybe a tangent, but I've gotten a lot of the joy back with 3D printing. You can just describe something, and Astra can model it in CAD extremely well. It usually takes a few iterations, and then you can just print it. I found that before, it would take days to build even simple models in Tinkercad - which while fun, was high enough friction that a lot of things would stay in the "ideas" folder - now I can have something real in an hour or two.
Fraterkes
These articles are frustrating on HN because it's quite common for programmers to tinker on small projects in solitude, so when artists complain about ai you get all these "just make stuff for your own sake, or where you in it for the fame?" reactions.
Vishal_Max
Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
01100011
I've had some form of this conversation several times in the past few months:Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."Them: "But I like writing code!"Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
hirako2000
Sounds like what artisans faced when suggested they better operate those machines that produce more widgets, faster, cheaper.
datron
I've tried finding a middleground with using coding agents. I mostly get them to show me documentation or examples of how to do something, rather than do the thing. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just ask opencode to make the change, but most times I do it myself. Has kept me happy
mathgeek
Makers rediscovering the joy of hobbies is a thing that I'm all in on and here for.
theplumber
I like the craft but I enjoy making products more. Working for 5 years on some tool chain/libraries has been great in terms of “technical” satisfaction but it would have been even more rewarding to build successful products with all that.And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
realaleris149
I can create the programming part of the game. I have done a couple. Where it stops working for me is at the visual assets. And especially sewing the code to the art.Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
bob1029
> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time?Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
simonebrunozzi
> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
reticulates
Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
f0e4c2f7
I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
spicyusername
Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy".It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
doginasuit
Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me.The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
rglover
I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
bix6
I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
jeffrallen
This is interesting because where he says "I take no pleasure in the results", I'm split. Sometimes I make something of no lasting value and feel no pleasure. Sometimes I use my context and creativity to ask for a result, and when the model one-shots it, I take a lot of pleasure in getting the result I want and need in that moment.
vanjajaja1
the old ways are dying, theres so much room for new creativity. exciting
globular-toast
I've noticed that delivery drivers are always racing around like their lives depend on it? Why do they do that? Because they are given workloads that are impossible to complete without racing. But what if it just didn't race? Their employers would be forced to hire more drivers, or increase the cost of delivery. By racing they are just building a rod for their own backs.I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think.I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.
Trasmatta
There is legit grief associated with what AI is doing to our craft, and we're all trying to grapple with it in our own ways
analog8374
in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
tananan
AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.
lloydatkinson
Off topic but is there anything like Hacker News but without AI posts?
indigodaddy
So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure and have glided upon the surface of webdev for a few decades, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage!Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake)https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know)https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version)https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP)https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol)https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream
api
My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.An art analogy:Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.Edit:The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
efields
I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software.I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
brador
Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise.Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.And it’s awesome.
IshKebab
You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
bbor
Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too.It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!On the (well written!) post's particulars:I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
Tristache
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BiNeuron
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noobahoi
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draw_down
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conmod278
With AI story telling, lot of people can tell their stories. Democratization of story telling. Earlier we just used words, now people can make others imagine the words with AI art. Honestly I want the best story to win. Anybody can be a storyteller.