alt Hacker NewsWe were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for.
Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual work? Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too?
This isn't me saying you shouldn't use AI. I use it all of the time to do useful side tasks like to setup GitHub Workflows while I write a feature, or with my agent on a VPS to do internet tasks for me. It's nice to have a little synthesized intelligence.
What isn't nice is to supplement your own intelligence. I think the gains are in the work there--similar to how you can be absolutely ripped from taking steroids while destroying your body. Often it's the shortcuts that are the most treacherous path.
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if computers themselves are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are cars. or even motorcycles, if we talk smaller models.
- they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "skills" and "memories". a bicycle (that is, your own mind + computer) handles such off-roads much better.
- they get you from A to B faster, sure, but along the way you may encounter something curious - a different road to take, an interesting vista. not to mention, bicycles are actually good for your health, and professional drivers suffer from all the sedentary job diseases we programmers do, unless they actively counter it. with LLMs, we get a "sedentary job disease" of skill atrophy, on top of all the other atrophies us coders should counter with a proper exercise set at least three times a week.
- finally, when you crash in a car (Opus/Sonnet, GPT-5.5) or, worse, on a motorcycle (smaller Qwens, DeepSeek, Haiku/GPT-5.4-nano), you crash very loudly and with a high chance of irrecoverable casualties.
You're either using it wrong, or work somewhere that sucks. I'm having a ton of fun coding with AI.
I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before.
I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuilding RBAC for my application after Claude royally messed it up.
Please stop saying we - because many of us didn't ever desire or contribute (outside of having our code / data / IP stolen) to these models or the companies developing them. Many of us weren't willingly singing up to use AI - we were essentially forced to by our employers. Not everyone is more productive now because of AI - many people spend the extra time they save writing code, reviewing code produced by AI.
> Sure, we're all more productive now, but…
I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experiencing the reward of seeing what I’ve built by hand working for the first time.
Do people really have fun managing a fleet of agents that generate the code instead? Or is it just the rush of producing something extremely quickly, much more quickly than you might be able to alone, regardless of how well (or poorly) it might work? For me, being able to move quickly was never the fun part.
It’s one thing to utilize AI to lessen the drudgework, the boilerplate, but I look at people who have gone all in on agentic development and it just really makes me wonder.