The Programmer Identity Crisis

This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. Programming has received a special treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need not.

Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the software productive process.

It is better to come to terms with this reality sooner rather than later in my opinion.

I started writing code in basic on a beige box. My first code on windows was a vb6 window that looked like the AOL login screen and used open email relays to send me passwords.

I've written a ton of code in my life and while I've been a successful startup CTO, I've always stayed in IC level roles (I'm in one right now in addition to hobby coding) outside of that, data structures and pipelines, keep it simple, all that stuff that makes a thing work and maintainable.

But here is the thing, writing code isn't my identity, being a programmer, vim vs emacs, mechanical keyboard, RTFM noob, pure functions, serverless, leetcode, cargo culting, complexity merchants, resume driven dev, early semantic css lunacy, these are thing outside of me.

I have explored all of these things, had them be part of my life for better or worse, but they aren't who I am.

I am a guy born with a bunch of heart defects who is happy to be here and trying new stuff, I want to explore in space and abstraction through the short slice of time I've got.

I want to figure stuff out and make things and sometimes that's with a keyboard and sometimes that's with a hammer.

I think there are a lot of societal status issues (devs were mostly low social status until The Social Network came out) and personal identity issues.

I've seen that for 40 years, anything tied to a persons identity is basically a thing they can't be honest about, can't update their priors on, can't reason about.

And people who feel secure and appreciated don't give much grace to those who don't, a lot of callous people out there, in the dev community too.

I don't know why people are so fast to narrow the scope of who they are.

Humans emit meaning like stars emit photons.

The natural world would go on without us, but as far as we have empirically observed we make the maximally complex, multi modally coherent meaning of the universe.

We are each like a unique write head in the random walk of giving the universe meaning.

There are a ton of issues from a network resilience and maximizing the random meaning generation walk where Ai and consolidation are extremely dangerous, I think as far as new stuff in the pipeline it's between Ai and artificial wombs that have the greatest risks for narrowing the scope of human discovery and unique meaning expansion to a catastrophic point.

But so many of these arguments are just post-hoc rationalizations to poorly justify what at root is this loss of self identity, we were always in the business of automating jobs out from under people, this is very weak tea and crocodile tears.

The simple fact is, all our tools should allow us to have materially more comfortable and free lives, the Ai isn't the problem, it's the fact that devs didn't understand that tech is best when empowering people to think and connect better and have more freedom and self determination with their time.

If that isn't happening it's not the codes fault, it's the network architecture of our current human power structures fault.

This is so funny to me.

Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

Did an AI write your post or did you "hand write it"?

Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do. Auto complete wasn't a huge time saver because writing code wasn't the bottleneck then and it definitely is not the bottleneck now. How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce. Specially if you pretend you're just doing "superior prompting with no hand coding involved".

LLMs are awesome but the IDE didn't replace the console text editor, even if it's popular.

> Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do.

And yet after 3 decades in the industry I can tell you this fantasy exists only on snarky HN comments.

> Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

hand-coding is 100% not the future, there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore (I help with one of them that used to have 19 "hand-coders" :) ). The typing for sure will get phased out. it is quite insane that it took "AI" to make people realize how silly and wasteful is to type characters into IDEs/editors. the sooner you see this clearly the better it will be for your career

> How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce.

if it doesn't you need to spend more time and learn and learn and learn more. 4/6/8 terminals at a time doing all various things for you etc etc :)

Agree, and well said. There are no points for hard work, only results -- this is an extremely liberating principle when taken to the limit and we should be happy to say goodbye to an era of manual software-writing being the norm, even if it costs the ego of some guy who spent the last 20 years being told SWE made him a demi-god.

I think there is only a very narrow band where LLMs are good enough at producing software that "hand-coding" is genuinely dead but at the same time bad enough that (expensive) humans still need to be paid to be in the loop.

> This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries.

It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the world's jobs obsolete, etc etc.

Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

It's survivorship bias to only look at horses, cars, calculators, and whatever other real job market shifting technologies occurred in the past and assume that's how it always happens. You have to include all predictions which never panned out.

As human beings we just tend no to do that.

[EDIT: this being Pedantry News let me get ahead of an inevitable reply: 3D printing is used industrially, and it does have tremendous value. It enabled new ways of working, it grew the economy, and in some cases yes it even replaced processes which used to depend on injection molding. But by and large, the original predictions of "out with the old, in with the new" did not pan out. It was not the automobile to the horse and buggy. It was mostly additive, complementary, and turned out to have different use cases. That's the distinction.]

> Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

One could have made a reasonable remark in the past about how injection molding is dramatically faster than 3D printing (it applies material everywhere, all at once), scales better for large parts, et cetera. This isn't really true for what I'm calling hand-coding.

Obviously nothing about the future can be known for certain... but there are obvious trends that need not stop at software engineering.

The trend of mistaken hype predictions indeed won't stop at software engineering.

How would you formulate this verifiably? Wanna take it to longbets.org?

I think you’re doing something wrong if your throughput gets too high. Llms will go hog wild adding hundreds of Loc for features that could take tens. You have to maintain that shit later

This is how black swan events are born.

> How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce.

I wouldn't say that, everything I've seen at work indicates the quality will change downwards.

It's very hard for me to answer this without being insulting:

- You have been in very bad environments if you think the way you think.

- Coding/typing is and wasn't the bottleneck. You're not fit to give advice to people on their careers if you think it is. Years of doing the wrong thing doesn't mean you're good.

- Your entire attitude screams "I'm a big seniority fish in a mediocre pond" but it breaks down when you can't put specificity behind your words.

- The last paragraph is just the cherry on top. I'm curious on the specifics actions happening in those terminals and how it relates to the quality and speed point. Why even 6 terminals and not some coordinator tool for what I presume are your "agents"?

> there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore

The only instances I've seen so far are from developers who are really, really bad at coding, but, under the false delusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, believe they're generating reams of "high quality" code.

Unfortunately this isn't like isn't a rare occurrence at all.