> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?” Oh, that's a very easy one: Anyone who cannot by themselves build working programs through coding is by defintion a non-coder, i. e. coding illiterate. That means you. So people like you need slop generators, or other forms of outsourcing, to pretend that the very solution to the problem (!), i. e. "writing code", "isn't super useful".
I think you misunderstand the perspective of someone who likes writing code. It's not the pressing of keys on the keyboard. It's figuring out which keys to press. Setting aside for the moment that most loops have a dynamic iteration count, typing out the second loop body is not fun if it's the same as the first. I do code golf for fun. My favorite kind of code to write is code I'll never have to support. LLMs are not sparking joy. I wish I was old enough to retire.
It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.
I can absolutely see that happening. It's already kind of happened to me a couple of times when I found myself offline and was still trying to work on my local app. Like any addiction, I expect it to cost me some money in the future
Yes, people who were at best average engineers and those that atrophied at their skill through lack of practice seem to be the biggest AI fanboys in my social media. It's telling, isn't it?
They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine. So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work". The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.
That IKEA analogy is pretty good, because plenty of people use IKEA furniture to solve the "I need a bookshelf" problem - and often enjoy the process - without feeling like they should call themselves a carpenter. I bet there are professional carpenters out there who occasionally assemble an IKEA bookshelf because they need something quick and don't want to spend hours building one themselves from scratch.
Definitely. I'm not disparaging the process of assembling IKEA furniture, nor the process of producing software using LLMs. I've done both, and they have their time and place. What I'm pushing back on is the idea that these are equivalent to carpentry and programming. I think we need new terminology to describe this new process. "Vibe coding" is at the extreme end of it, and "LLM-assisted software development" is a mouthful. Although, the IKEA analogy could be more accurate: the assembly instructions can be wrong; some screws may be missing; you ordered an office chair and got a dining chair; a desk may have five legs; etc. Also, the thing you built is made out of hollow MDF, and will collapse under moderate levels of stress. And if you don't have prior experience building furniture, you end up with no usable skills to modify the end result beyond the manufacturer's original specifications. So, sure, the seemingly quick and easy process might be convenient when it works. Though I've found that it often requires more time and effort to produce what I want, and I end up with a lackluster product, and no learned skills to show for it. Thus learning the difficult process is a more rewarding long-term investment if you plan to continue building software or furniture in the future. :)
Little bit of a sweeping generalization there. There are a huge range of ways in which LLMs are being leveraged for software development. Using a drill doesn’t make you any less of a carpenter, even if you stopped using a screwdriver because your wrists are shot.
I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient
One concern is those less experienced engineers might never become experienced if they’re using AI from the start. Not that everyone needs to be good at coding. But I wonder what new grads are like these days. I suspect few people can fight the temptation to make their lives a little easier and skip learning some lessons.
Perhaps it is a skill issue. But I don't really see the point of trying when it seems like the gains are marginal. If agent workflows really do start offering 2x+ level improvements then perhaps I'll switch over, in the meantime I won't have to suffer mental degradation from constant LLM usage.
> I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence. By not managing anything? Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I understand it. I've found myself looking at new stacks and tech, not knowing what I didn't know, and wondering where to start. But if you skip these fundamentals of the modern dev cycle, what happens when the LLM fails?
Then it fails and the world doesn't end. You fix it or delegate it and move on. Most people aren't working on code for power grids and fighter jets. There's room for failure. This same argument was used by the old timers when younger programmers couldn't code assembly or C on bare metal systems.
> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people: backend developers, frontend developers, marketers, leaders, and more. I can lean on those experiences, fall back on how they did things, and implement their methods with AI. Will that really work? You interacted with the end product, but you don't have the experience and learned lessons that those people had. Are you sure this isn't the LLM reinforcing false confidence? Is the AI providing you with the real thing or a cheap imitation and how can you tell?
As someone who always dabbled in code but never was a “real” developer, I’ve found the same thing. I know the concepts, I know good from bad — so all of a sudden I can vibe code things that would have taken me months of studying and debugging and banging my head against the wall. If you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion, I also wrote some brief thoughts on my Adventures In AI Prototyping: https://www.andrew-turnbull.com/adventures-in-ai-prototyping...
I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble getting started on a sub-task being a good trick to keep your brain engaged. I’ve personally seen LLMs be huge time savers on specific bugs, for writing tests, and writing boilerplate code. They’re huge for working in new frameworks that roughly map to one you already know. But for the nitty gritty that ends up being most of the work on a mature product where all of the easy stuff is already done they don’t provide as big of a multiplier.
Of course its fun. Making slop _is_ very fun. Its a low-effort dopamine-driven way of producing things. Learning is uncomfortable. Improving things using only your braincells can be very difficult and time consuming.
With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't. It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.
Ok but you didn't ask any questions in the transcript you provided. Maybe that one was an outlier? In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well.
You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks. I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness.
To me it seems like for OP development was a means towards an end. The act to developing software as a craft does not seem to be of importance to him while the output is. His post is full of references to productivity and lacking references of improving his skills (as opposed to using LLMs as a crutch) or getting better at writing software. I bet OP would be equally happy if he had AGI that would write everything for him. For many in HN, programming is an end in itself and they would not be happy giving that up just because it makes you finish quicker.
>>Starting a new project once felt insurmountable. Now, it feels realistic again. Honestly, this does not give me confidence in anything else you said. If you can't spin up a new project on your own in a few minutes, you may not be equipped to deal with or debug whatever AI spins up for you. >>When AI generates code, I know when it’s good and when it’s not. I’v seen the good and the bad, and I can iterate from there. Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Minus a baseline, it's hard to tell what this means. 10x nothing is nothing. How am I supposed to know what 1x is for you, is there a 1x site I can look at to understand what 10x would mean? My overall feeling prior to reading this was "I should hire this guy", and after reading it my overwhelming thought was "eat a dick, you sociopathic self-aggrandizing tool." Moreover, if you have skill which you feel is augmented by these tools, then you may want to lean more heavily on that skill now if you think that the tool itself makes everyone capable of writing the same amazing code you do. Because it sounds like you will be unemployed soon if not already, as a casualty of the nonsense engine you're blogging about and touting.