alt Hacker News> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise.
Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!
I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code.
I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.
I want to write code.
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I love to write code too. But what usually happens is that I go through running the gauntlet of proving how brilliant code I can write in a job interview, and then later conversely being paid for listening to really dumb conversations of our stakeholders and sitting in project planning, etc meetings just so that finally everybody can harass me to implement something that a million programmer implemented before me a million times, at which point the only metric that matters to either my fellow developers or my managers or the stakeholders is the speed of churning the code out, quality or design be damned. So for this reason in most cases in my work I use LLMs.
How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.
Writing code is my passion, and like you I'm amazed I get paid to do it. That said in any new project there is a large swath of code that needs to be written that I've written many times before. I'm happy to let the LLM write the low value code so I can work on the interesting parts. Examples of this type of code are argument parsers and interfacing with REST interfaces. I add no value there.
> I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.
Some people don't enjoy writing code and went into software development only because it's a well paid and a stable job. Now this trade is under the thread and they are happy to switch to prompting LLMs. I do like to code so use LLMs less then many my colleagues.
Though I don't expect to see many from this crowd in HM, instead I expect here to see entrepreneurs who need a product to sell and don't care if it is written by humans or by LLMs.
So write code.
Maybe post renaissance many artists no longer had patrons, but nothing was stopping them from painting.
If your industry truely is going in the direction where there's no paid work for you to code (which is unlikely in my opinion), nobody is stopping you. It's easier than ever, you have decades of personal computing at your fingertips.
Most people with a thing they love do it as a hobby, not a job. Maybe you've had it good for a long time?
I'm quite ok with only writing code in my personal time. In fact, if I could solve the problems there faster, I'd be delighted.
Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational value.
I also love to code, though it's not what people pay to do anymore.
You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is, does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto: don't predict, prepare.
>I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.
Regardless of AI this has been years in the making. “Learn to code” has been the standard grinder cryptobro advice for “follow the money” for a while, there’s a whole generation of people getting into the industry for financial reasons (which is not wrong, just a big cultural shift).
Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares
Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”
Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.
Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.
That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.
So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.