alt Hacker NewsYup. The only caveat I'd add is that I'm using an alternate account to agree with people who say that AI coding has been amazing, because there is a seemingly a good chunk of people who dislike it and it will be met with downvotes. Also because my real account has my real name in the profile along with projects I work on, and a simple search could reveal my pro-AI coding views and these same folks who downvote could also be a future interviewer.
I think the world changed. And it's changed for the good. AI is a tool, and we should not be afraid of this tool for the coding world. I am only speaking about coding, I'm not speaking about other uses of AI, just so that we're clear on the scope of what I mean by good change.
For the first time, I see people who had all these ideas finally bring them to reality and watch it blossom. They wanted to build something to share with their communities, but the walls were too high. Too much gatekeeping. Too much of thinking that programming was a task for the elite few and not for the masses. Along the way, we all forgot that we build tools for people. And having an additional tool help us make better tools for people is a win. Just below this comment, I see people talking about dementia, "lots more generated code, almost all of it garbage", "future where garbage software".
I think the only delusional ones are the idea that humans were better at coding. Have you never had to work on an older project? One that you did not have to start fresh on? Or did you come into either one and go "wow, this is perfect! everything is so beautiful!" Do you seriously consider your fresh project (that didn't use AI) to be the best most perfect beautiful code ever?
The fact is that nobody cares. People want to use good things and have fun with their lives. They're not worried about whether you wrote a method that parses some strings beautifully or did it with a one-liner. That never mattered, and I think a lot of you can't let go of that world view change and instead lash out at people who simply embrace that programming was simply a tool, not some elite special skill. And we're going back to those beliefs. It's done. It's over. Get over it.
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Well said. Most of my career I made a trade-off and that trade-off was that I would much rather spend my free time outside in nature than on implementing my wild ideas which I always recognized would take considerable time. I'd maybe take 1% of my ideas anywhere. Now I can play with ideas while I'm out on the trail and turn those into something I can test within a couple hours, it's the most fun I've had on computers since the very beginning.
Agreed. I think the opinion on AI is split into two camps, people who's enjoyment from programming came from writing the code and people who like building things. It's really undeniable at this point that AI has changed the job and I really enjoy it now more than ever, I can come up with an idea, guide an LLM through the steps to build it and have it be a real thing faster than I ever could have imagined.
Yeah LLMs aren't perfect, there is back and forth along the way and if you just let it loose you are going to end up with slop but I feel like we can achieve better quality now in a shorter amount of time using the tool properly. I'm not sure if I am just naive but I am really excited about the possibilities now and have been spending more time than ever building what I want. I used to think that writing the code was the enjoyable part for me but I think it was just building things.
I empathize with people in the other camp who got into it for the love of the code and now that part of the job is being taken away but I think it would benefit them to be honest about LLMs and try and work out a path forward here rather than just "my function is better than an LLM one, LLMs are just slop machines"