Did AI take it away, or did you give it away?

Now that you've made the Faustian bargain at this low low introductory price, how long until they start ratcheting up the price? How long will you be able to bear it?

You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Given the rapid skill degradation that results from LLM-driven coding usage, I'd recommend it if you want to retain any skill at all.

It's not true at all. I recently vibe coded a REST API in Golang even though I never wrote any production Go code. However, I had to make copious use of my previous experience as an engineer to achieve quality.

You can see this in the real world. The people who are getting the most out of AI are the ones who already have experience coding without AI.

CEOs don't want to admit it but AI can't code anything non-trivial on its own.

I really do differentiate between fast & vast changes of commodity code and critical sections. For the latter I’d explore with AI and then rewrite, line by line, with deliberate concern for all aspects relevant.

This does retain the joy of coding for me and takes away the pain of what is commodity and hard to do without tiresome meetings (mostly UI/UX and API/MCP as my products don’t differentiate on these).

I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit

I just spent the past three hours debugging a long latent bug from vibe coding a thing. The only way I found it was running a debugger through the C++ code and tracing everything -- Claude was utterly useless until I basically pointed out the problem to it. I don't think understanding technical aspects of programming is a waste of time at all, it's still very necessary. The annoying thing too is that, whatever time I saved having the LLM write it, I pretty much just lost having to debug it. (For what it's worth: the bug it introduced is one I never would have introduced on my own, because it fundamentally misunderstood a key component of the design)

same camp

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all.

I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few days. It wouldn't even matter if I got it done faster since the bottleneck is decisions in the next meeting or waiting to hear back from another team. Dev time was always trivial and irrelevant. Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal.

What else are you doing with your time? How much discussion does your team even have if the nuances of the code aren't important to you?

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts

perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone. we can finally be in a room and just talk about good engineering. the people we as engineers never wanted to hear from are off attempting to force the world to use a tool that everyone 40 and under passionately rejects (this is spicy for HN terms, but the avg joe hates AI. people aren't stupid - they know they only stand to lose from it in the longer term).

perspective shift 2: I just read Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It taught me a lot. I came away from that book understanding what "quality" means at a very philosophical level, and it gave me a lot of confidence for some fuzzy thoughts I already felt. it's too abstract to explain here, but it does a good job of explaining that there is perceived and strong difference between caring something into existence, verses just generating something into existence. this book breaks down how quality is not some artifact that lives in what you're making, and or is some feeling you get when you look at something that is aesthetically pleasing - quality is an event that occurs before you mind has differentiated yourself from the thing subject/object you're admiring - and in that moment, quality arises from the care you give it. there must exists energy and care towards what you're doing for quality to arise. generating anything with AI will never bring that fruition.

many people try to counter this stance by saying that they iterate with AI forever, and assume that iteration is a the same as the caring event described in ZATAOMM - but the difference is that grading output is not the same as creating/authorship. it's must a read and deep study I think if you're into programming and this mental state

perspective shift 3: This talk from Brandon Sanderson called We are the Art [1]. I personally do a lot of creative coding - like games and such. this talk does a great job of breaking down how art and creation ultimately lives in the person. I won't summarize here, just a must a watch

perspective shift 4: I got off all the mainstream social media site bc the PR machine for AI is relentless. of course you're going to feel like crap when every site says, future generations will be homeless, K shaped economy, permanent underclass, etc. you gotta log off these sites to create some distance with the beast - it's not you, the world really is just messed up rn. Also I barely browse HN anymore. this place is the public square for VCs and people who lost hte plot with technology - I just happened to be here, and wanted to help my fellow programmer grinding through the same mental trenches I was in

perspective shift 5: go find some programming communities on discord. I'm in a discord with like 5000 active members that really care about coding, and doing so without AI. this is a very active discord. once you realize there is a strong community still building like this, it really showed me we're not low in numbers, and there still a large group of people that will celebrate engineering efforts done by hand. and there are still people that need to understand these machines at a very deep level - you're efforts aren't wasted

perspective shift 6: look at AI on the job as a way to get your work done faster to get home to do real programming. work code can be trash, home is where the real work is done. The analogy I’ve been telling myself is that it’s like going into a gold mine - no one wants to be in the mine, but i do like leaving with gold. i gotta pay the bills, but i don’t need to love it.

perspective shift 7: The overall environment we live is just depressing and is reminiscent to Fahrenheit 451. I came away feeling closer to the author and protagonist than my first read. specifically the kind of hubris/ignorance found in all the side characters of F451 mimics what it feels like to talk with ai optimists. also, the way F451 is a world filled with people that are actively disengaged and comfortable being passively entertained feels almost too real. this book draws a lot of parallels with modern times, and it's a nice book to remind you that other people have felt this way in times of large technological change - and you're not crazy to feel depressed.

Go start working on that side project you use to be really passionate about. me and all the other serious engineers are excited to see it

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo