Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(

Happy for everyone who enjoys it. For me it's the opposite: AI everywhere sucks the joy out of it and I'm seriously starting to consider a career shift after roughly 10 years of writing code for a living.

Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago.

Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.

Same here.

Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.

I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.

I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).

Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.

The key phrase here is "I still had domain expertise". Many miss that AI is a multiplier. If you multiply 0 by AI, you get 0 (or hallucinated garbage). You multiplied your knowledge of compound interest and UX by AI's speed. Without your background, the AI would have generated a beautiful interface that calculates mortgages using a savings account formula. Your role shifted from "code writer" to "logic validator" - this is the future of development for domain specialists

Thank you for the beautiful story. I work as a developer and have experienced the same in my personal projects, linux setup and - in general - all the collaterals.

AI is eroding the entry barrier, the cognitive overload, and the hyper-specialization of software development. Once you step away from a black-and-white perspective, what remains is: tools, tools, tools. Feels great to me.

Slightly moving into the other direction, after 17 years of science and tech optimism I see myself turning into a Luddite more and more. First observation was that communication and social aspects of software seems crucial for success and proliferation. And next came: that technology seems inept to solve any socio-econimic problems, but rather aggravates them.

Similar path here - studied physics, worked in accounting/finance for years, hadn't shipped code in forever. The thing that clicked for me wasn't the AI itself but realising my domain knowledge had actually been compounding the whole time I wasn't coding.

The years "away" gave me an unusually clear picture of what problems actually need solving vs what's technically interesting to build. Most devs early in their careers build solutions looking for problems. Coming back after working in a specific domain, I had the opposite - years of watching people struggle with the same friction points, knowing exactly what the output needed to look like.

What I'd add to the "two camps" discussion below: I think there's a third camp that's been locked out until now. People who understand problems deeply but couldn't justify the time investment to become fluent enough to ship. Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.

The $100 spent on Opus to build 60 calculators is genuinely good ROI compared to what that would have cost in dev hours, even for someone proficient. That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space.

Reality: LLMs allow you to assemble shitty frustrating stacks quickly.

That's creating a new inefficient, socially destructive, environmentally damaging hammer because solving the real problem doesn't sell well.

I'll be happy when we solve THAT problem.

Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.

Made with care for accuracy.

I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.

He also wrote this post with AI if I had to guess.

I've lost the joy in programming, the only thing I'm good at, I now make horrible music, but at least I don't exist as the means to an end that I don't control.

Related: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qfjwpe/ralph_l...

It’s more like AI provides the development team, and you are the key user and product manager that comes with all the requirements and domain knowledge, the lead architect reviewing the architecture, and the lead UXer reviewing the UX.

Does the "iv" in your name stand for "implied volatility" by chance? : - )

I don’t like AI for production code, but I love it for ideation and prototyping. I agree. It really allows you to quickly iterate on ideas without being blocked by implementation details.

For me it’s kinda the same. I always hated typing actual code, I love planing, reading, finding bugs etc. But writing code? Eh, I never enjoyed that. Now with agents I can kinda do exactly what I like, plan, write in natural langue and then do code review.

But when will Larry Fink start vibecoding DeFi ?!!

The table doesn't work (scroll sideways) on my mobile just FWIW

In this sense LLMs are another wave of "end-user programming" like excel formula. This has been the recurring experience of many in these waves.

Nice project! One small suggestion, adding a search or category filter would help simplify navigation given the number of calculators available.

Congrats! I never stopped coding, but AI makes it way more productive and fun for sure.

$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.

>The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck.

Have you tried this? https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

Well in my opinion there's nothing wrong with vibe-coding. You can completely use it to make your passion projects. I draw the line when people try to sell their vibe-coded project as something huge, putting people at the risk of potential security breaches while also taking money out of them.

Every other day I see ads of companies saying "use our AI and become a millionaire", this kind of marketing from agentic IDEs implies no need for developers who know their craft, which as said above, isn't the case.

LLMs are the best BI tool available.

The "knowledge base" at the bottom is 100% slop. Why? Why inflict this on people?

As I read this post I realized that a majority of my US colleagues _write exactly like that_ holy crap it’s gonna bug me all the time now.

Same. Fell out of love with programming after the first few years because the thought of spending my life staring at a screen and dealing with insignificant minutia suddenly seemed horrible. Spent a lot of years in management and LLMs gave me a way to build things I wanted again. Currently building a platformer.

Genuine congratulations. Ignore the unconstructive comments you’ll get (I already flagged one.)

This is a revolution, welcome back to coding :)

> Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."

I guess this is what separates some people. But I always explicitly tell it to use only HTML/JS/CSS without any libraries that I've vetted myself. Generating code allows you now not having to deal with it a lot more.

Cool to hear nonetheless. Can we now also stop stigmatizing AI generated music and art? Looking at you Steam disclosures.