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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 5 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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aeblyve ◴[21 Oct 25 20:18 UTC] No.45661139[source]▶
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.

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isaacremuant ◴[21 Oct 25 21:12 UTC] No.45661784[source]▶
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.

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1. bdangubic ◴[21 Oct 25 21:39 UTC] No.45662057[source]▶
> 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 :)

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2. BriggyDwiggs42 ◴[22 Oct 25 05:33 UTC] No.45665213[source]▶
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
3. greazy ◴[22 Oct 25 06:24 UTC] No.45665494[source]▶
This is how black swan events are born.
4. isaacremuant ◴[22 Oct 25 22:26 UTC] No.45675958[source]▶
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"?

5. toprerules ◴[22 Oct 25 23:53 UTC] No.45676625[source]▶
> 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.