I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.
I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.
They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.
I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.
Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.
> Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
that’s because they were. They needed to kill the career because we were educated, well off, fulfilled, and becoming organized. Turns out not all of us were either easily manipulated marks or unscrupulous money goblins and that was a problem for them.
Remember when Google employees stood up for what is right against the company? That’s when the powers that be in the industry decided to go all in on AI. They need to destroy the career and industry because we had to much power and intelligence.
I hear you, brother. The prospect of being just a babysitter for the clanker strikes me as hell on earth. I'll try to do it - better to be miserable but employed, after all. But if that happens I will mourn the death of a job which I truly loved for the rest of my life.
It isn't ideal, but I am starting to write code (with AI tab completions) while waiting for LLMs. The tab completions are sometimes overeager and I wish I had more control over them, but at least I am not staring at "Thinking" all day. Having said that sometimes you have to monitor AI because, e.g., AGY CLI, often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."
It's not just waiting on them, you're going to be reviewing an endless flood of their agentic slop, cajoling or bullying them into sticking with a problem or looking harder for information, all in between glancing at AI summaries of your colleagues' AI generated Slack messages and approving the AI generated auto-replies.
It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways. On the plus side, I can let my frustration out by calling them fucking morons without getting HR mad at me
> It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways
Wait until the agents start assigning you real world tasks to earn a paycheck. They can easily become the boss when they hold the strings. I feel this side of the discussion isn't happening.
The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output.
Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a restaurant chef to a microwave button pusher.
> The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
At least as a software manager you get the satisfaction of helping another human being develop in their own career. I doubt making Claude Code less prone to certain kinds of fuckups is quite as rewarding.
Meh. Since when "typing" implies "solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity". The "solving" and the "creativity" happen in your head while "typing" is a manual labor. I can contemplate multiple problems at the same time but I can only type one thing at a time. Writing code is like 10% of my programming job. I take an LLM to do the typing for me any day. I still solve challenging problems. Because my secret skill isn't typing, you see. Yeah, call it "dismissive".
You must truly have no love for your craft if you see "manually" writing code as _just_ typing. That's like calling writing a novel just dragging ink over paper.
Yeah, sure. We both know it’s not black and white. Like all of you write rocket ship software. You’re all funny. Heads too far up your asses. What fucking craft are you talking about “implement this html and css exactly like described in the ticket”, or “write this deployment pipeline for that client for the 50th time”, or “implement authentication for the 15th time this year”. Really fucking novel stuff. Craft my ass.
Not going to bother responding to most of that as it does not warrant a response, but I would point out that the word craft does not imply novelty or uniqueness.
In many cases the really key idea that transforms the overall system design comes from working closely on the specific implementation details. Maybe you don't redesign the system this time, but you saw how you might do it, and you get ideas about how to do it the next time. The craft involves a back-and-forth between different levels of abstraction, and cutting that link does feel like we're sacrificing something.
Yeah, you do it every day for money, right? And someone is paying you for that? Dude, people designed ships, aircrafts, the shuttle with a ruler and a pencil, today people use CAD and CFD because it’s cheaper and better but people still know how to use the ruler and pencil! At least those who want to know, know. But not everything has to be designed with the ruler and the pencil. Be the guy who presses buttons, and knows how to use the ruler and the pencil!
It’s different, because in our field we’re often learning or doing new things, as opposed to merely rehashing the exact same thing we’ve done before.
I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
And indeed, most mathematicians, who do get paid to do math, work a lot with pencil and paper. If math is secondary to your job, you likely will not, but if it’s your primary job, you likely spend a lot of time working ideas out in the more primitive fashion.
> I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
The whole point of the discussion about LLMs in our field is exactly what you say. Yes, we do often find ourselves doing new things. They are exciting the first and the second time we do them. Later they become a chore.
When you’re doing something that requires a lot of typing for the 17th time… why! Like, how many times are you going to write that golang http server scaffold. Or, how many times are you going to create that new terraform project with those same modules. I hear people say “oh yeah, write a generator”. To which my answer is: do you have a budget for it, or do I need to invest my own time.
It’s possible to guard the model so that it acts according to your expectations. Just invest the time in that tooling. It’s as exciting as any other problem. You learn the domain by writing software guardrails, your effort results in a software analysis of the business domain problem. It’s a much more valuable and rewarding work than writing some code.
Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same.
It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now distrust and hate.
Exactly. I work on line of business stuff, not curing world hunger or reinventing the train. One of the few sources of joy in the job is the brain teaser/puzzle of understanding clever bits of code and writing it too. Now you can just shit out massive volumes of basic code that does the job, which is all you really need for a standard corporate software product, and it can do it multiple times faster than I can so I have no choice but to use it. Well at least my shares are looking good.
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
I've already got more interesting, informative books on my to-read list than I'm going to have time to finish in my lifetime, so I think I'll be fine without youtube.
If you're interviewing, you get that kind of mismatched response and don't jump in to clarify the scope of the question, I'm not sure that says much about the culture you're supposed to fit into.
Yes, all the time. I usually pay a 1 cent fee and the transaction goes through in seconds. Not sure what you're talking about.
I can send you some if you want to try it out, just drop an address(for a wallet I recommend cakewallet, but any popular open source wallet works).
I'm talking about Monero specifically, but your reply makes no sense because there are cryptos that have 0 transaction fee and instant confirmaiton. But they are less secure and private so I don't use them, I only use Monero.
Yeah, monero has low transaction fees. And is a pain in the ass to get, even more so in significant quantity or at a good exchange rate. You pay a significant premium for the privacy. So just different types of fees. Monero is also far from instant in my experience.
I too have plenty of purchasing experience with crypto and I wouldn’t advocate for it for any legal transaction.
> And is a pain in the ass to get, even more so in significant quantity or at a good exchange rate.
It's easy to get in the USA on Kraken from fiat for a very low fee or 0 with their pro plan.
> Monero is also far from instant in my experience.
It's up to the merchant to decide how many transactions before finishing their end of the deal. For small purchases it's low risk to do 0 confirmations and you can scale with price.
I've seen hundred dollar sales given out as soon as the transaction hits the mempool, before the first confirmation as well as 5 dollar sales that require waiting the whole 10 confirmations.
I just don’t see it. Linux is about choice, if something sucks there is almost certainly an alternative. All 3 people using flatpak but not systemd will just have to use one of the million other ways to install a program.
We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
working in a large codebase I use Claude for code understanding and the code reviews from Macroscope have caught bugs for me a bunch of times. Usually if I use claude it’s for refactoring a and source to source transformations that would be too confusing for me to figure out how to do with e.g. ast-grep, but that I can prompt in a minute or two and then have claude work through it. It’s stuff I could do without LLMs but it’s less effort to use them. I don’t let it write new code, because it decays the process of programming as theory building.
not the person you're replying to, but someone who agrees with the gist of their message - I personally use Claude Code as a better Google search for debugging and syntax.
It used to be "oh, why am I getting an error on line 352, let me google the error message and wade through Stack Overflow answers" now it's "Claude, why am I getting an error on line 352? Ah, it's because $REASON, let's see if that fixes it, yes, thank you."
Obviously reading the official documentation is very useful, but sometimes you can't find anything that relevant to your exact use case, and forums are also very useful, but it can take hours or even days to get a reply to question when the LLM can do it in like a minute.
I've used both ChatGPT and Claude, they seem interchangeable for my needs. I only use the web prompt interface except for the rare occasion that it is helpful for it to have the context of my entire project. I think less is more when it comes to LLM interaction, but sometimes they are exactly the right tool for the job.
I didn't realize you wanted that information too, I could probably bore someone to death talking about it.
Planning: I often ask it to help me plan an approach if we are dealing with something I don't have a lot of experience with, most recently working with the DOM. If there is a library or an API that is new to me, I ask for an overview and run my plan by it for comments. Feed it the documentation and it is like talking to author.
Coding: I have a pretty reliable sense for when a section of code that I want to write is obvious enough for the LLM to one-shot based on the other code in the file, and on those occasions I call in completion. I do this with code that I can verify at a glance.
Analysis: If I have any uncertainty at all about the code I've written, I run it by the LLM to find issues. Out of all the other uses, I think this is the most productive and time saving. If I run into a bug and I'm stumped, I show it the section of code. I'm amazed at how good it is at finding mistakes.
I'm working solo as a full stack developer coming from a different background, so I sometimes find myself out of my depth. Having access to the breadth of knowledge that an LLM brings and its attention to detail has been game changing. I've tried a couple agents and configuring them to work competently seems like a rabbit hole, and I like the tight control over the context that chatting with the web prompt interface brings. It seems like half the value is putting into words my intent, it forces me to have a cohesive understanding myself. It is like rubber duck debugging where the duck can actually talk back and sometimes provide the critical part that I'm missing. I have it speak like a pirate which is just for fun but sometimes the sailing metaphors that it uses are really intuitive.
I've been working on a C++ backend for F# and while I'm very familiar with F# and it's AST I barely know C++. The amount of time I save being able to ask things, check my understanding, get design patterns, and paste issues I'm having for a fix is insane
I ran into an issue where I was getting a segfault and everything looked right in the debuggr, including expected values near the segfault. Turns out I wasn't using placement new somewhere I needed, and the data for the object was getting copied but not the vtables. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to figure that out on my own because the segfault was coming from so far away
I haven't had the opportunity to use LLMs much for coding since I'm not working right now, but I can second how much of a boost just getting specific answers to my questions instead of reading tons of whatever online searches return is.
Rubber duck that talks back is a nice way to put it
This is more or less how I use Claude and Kim 2.5 via Kagi. If I just let it spew out code I have no idea what it does and no interest whatsoever to try to comn through it all. But when I have need to ask about syntax or correct use of library function etc. - I’m learning C++ - and can’t grok the docs, it can be incredibly helpful. Also is great at finding bugs.
I think of it kinda “very knowledgeable dumb person” - it knows everything but understands fuck all (although it can appear to do so just by breadth of information it has). If I can formulate a question in a way it gives me the correct info it helps me to conceptually understand the problem better then filling out the blanks. Often I figure out the answer to my question just by writing it down without needing to prompt it, so speaking rubber duck is very apt way to call it.
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