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- Hacker News
- > Increasing employer profits was never my goal. I always loved to solve puzzles
This is the core reason. It hit me hard too. What worked is accepting the change, and then tuning to the new world, new challenges, and new identity. It's the only option.
by unified101 - I switched gear to learn how to train AI, design evals and explore neuroscience so we can further apply how our brains better in the new world. I enjoy coding, but it's time to adapt.
I came to this realization after I used Cursor to rewrite a 10-year old codebase (I knew every bit of the details.) and it was done in 2 days. Better, fewer technical debt and I was happy to archive the old repo.
by billylo - Different kinds of logic puzzles. They are also good stimulus to our brain and valuable skills.by billylo
- I am MLOps in a big tech company. My work is tightly coupled with training and online inferencing SOTA LLM's. Doesn't change anything in the equationby bah9
- Yeah, I am also interested in learning how LLMs works. So planning to spend some time on building a toy LLM to understand the principles.
Do you have any resource in your had which you could suggest?
by anony-123 - Indeed. Vibe coding is making those of us in tech lose ourselves more and more.
We used to be obsessed with elegant design and would lose sleep over an optimization. Since vibe coding came along, those days are gone for good. As technologists, we typically feel anxious about losing control over our code. The speed of AI makes it nearly impossible for us to carefully review the code.
We know AI makes mistakes all the time, and our job has become that of an AI corrector.
by BrucecarlL - I have a CS degree and have been a SWE for 13 years but never really developed a love of coding or software in general, I just happened to learn it and be pretty good at it in 2008. But even I have lost a bit of my identity, having one of the few things I have done most days for a decade+ be commoditized is pretty brutal no matter how I feel about software. For the past few years I've been trying to see where the puck is going (I've been leaning towards moving into management) but at this point I'm just trying to hold on until I reach financial independence. I assume my viewpoint is probably square in the middle of most folks in my position.by Ocerge
- I relate to this on a deep level. I have been writing software professionally for 18 years. Programming was the fun part of the job. Solving deep technical problems, digging through docs, etc. All that seems to be gone now. Unfortunately the business does not care about any of the above, all that matters is output. My job pays me for output therefore I have no choice but to embrace the Claude pandemic.
I wish I had better news, but really just want you to know you are not alone and I empathize with you. I do think there is a cost to pay when using AI to output all of the code. A deep mental model is impossible and this will have downstream impacts. I am hopeful this will settle into a happy middle ground where AI is used but not relied upon.
by harryquach - > the Claude pandemic
Wow. This phrasing hits home so hard.
by dofm - As an older programmer being able to not waste my mental space with details and the churn of newer frameworks allows me to explore projects I wanted to build for years but lack the time and energy I had in my 20s.
The goal was being able to make things and I've judged my abilities on how much faster I can do things year after year. This speeds things up on one side but creates this backlog of things that need testing.
I still love programming but I always preferred the language and style I used 30 years ago. I've been forced to adapt to newer ways, frameworks and different methods to keep up with the times. Using AI is the new react/angularjs frontend pattern of 2015. All of these new patterns were less satisfying then what we had before.
For me I'm doing things I couldn't find time before and polishing areas I could but weren't high quality enough.
Paying for AI is a struggle mentally and trying to find a good balance is part of the newer challenge. A codex subscription gets used up too quickly or I can't find enough tasks to use up my subscription and both states cause mental burden. At work trying to maximum output while keeping within a reasonable token usage level is a struggle. Local models using cpu can do a lot for free but need to be carefully planned to limit scope. Using free opencode models works but code quality can fall apart so carefully balancing that can be hard. The code quality of top end models looks awful but can be better if you want to spend time on that aspect and trying to balance that with token usage is hard.
My biggest wonder is if job interviews are testing that you can hand code still but forcing you to use llms when hired.
by ipaddr - > How do you feel?
My experience is all encompassing. AI has attacked and destroyed almost every aspect of my previous identity over the last 2 years, as well as all of my achievements. My life today as a result is very different. Almost all of the things I used to do for fun or to pass time I no longer do.
I documented this in another comment recently so won't rehash but if you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334614
For me it's all of the writing and little projects I created which are now basically useless that hurts the most. I can try to find other ways to be useful going forward but I'll never get back decades of lost time. I have so much pointless knowledge polluting my head.
I'm a massive AI doomer though and fairly sure RSI is nearing or maybe here. Given this the next few years are likely to make any current concerns about identity seem so small and silly that I'm trying to focus on the things that matter and trying to live in the moment.
I'm basically living like I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer – just trying to absorb as much of life as I can and not worrying too much about the future which has been taken from me.
by kypro - People who never really had these feelings about coding will turn up to tell you that you are wrong to care or that it is childish or silly to care.
You are not wrong to have your feelings or to strongly identify your sense of self with your work; that is what we used to call “finding your vocation”.
I share your feelings and have been focusing my energy on learning local and open weights AI to work through it because it seems to be impossible to avoid it all entirely as a freelancer who needs to remain competitive, and a bit of righteous/ethics/sustainable process fire in my belly doesn’t hurt.
But focusing on how you feel first, and then hopefully thinking about other ways you can feel valuable, is not wrong.
You are not alone and I wish you the best.
by dofm - I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. Seems like most of them are happy to "be able to do great things without boring coding"... but gathering information and setting a task is an entirely different profession.
I'm always curious, what are those "great things" requiring deep technical knowledge and years of expertise that these visionaries can finally provide with the help of LLMs?
I almost feel ashamed/mentally ill when i am reading how everyone is happy that their true visionnaire potential is finally unlocked while i just like to solve my silly puzzles.
by bah9 - I mostly strongly identify with this. Been coding for ~35 years, if you count toy programs on a Spectrum. My world is being completely destroyed. And it's probably normal. I also don't understand TikTok, new Avengers, or queueing for bubble tea. That's why evolution invented death (and renewal).
One outlet in all this AI craze is finding creative use of it in mundane work. For example, recently I made SIMD-level optimizations for XLS parser that is used maybe 2 times per day. Before AI I could never waste a week or two on doing something silly like that.
I'm sure the "price reckoning" will come to us when VC will find out they didn't have infinite money, but for now we can have some level of fun even with AI.
by mstaoru - Personally I feel a bit sad and annoyed sometimes, lots of folks I know that are working in some non technical roles e.g. lawyers in public departments or doctors in medecine come to me to show me their apps and tools and data science scripts they've written, and I have to admit their work looks totally respectable and they get it published on the app store. It can be a bit demoralizing as I feel like IT/software doesn't have any protected spaces for us engineers, whereas e.g. my friends in medecine or law feel fine as even though AI might come up with diagnoses or law expertise it won't be legally allowed to replace their function as there's a ton of red tape to ensue only certified lawyers and doctors can practice law or medecine. There's nothing like that in software engineering (at least in most fields) so in principle every "hack" can let their vibe coded data science results, software or script loose on the world. To a degree it feels quite disprespectful even. But it has always been like that I guess.by ThePhysicist
- Exactly this. If those old-school professions didn't have protections they gained from lobbing for dozens of years, they would be facing the same reality we are.
If you think about it, a lawyer is an ideal profession to replace with AI. To a large extend doctors diagnosing based on inputs is the same. But they have the keys in form of their diplomas.
- Most senior level programmers have 2 options. (junior / early-mid level folks may want to consider re-skilling to a different field)
1. Embrace the AI and continue working and earning for as long as you can. Bank as much savings as possible. Lower your cost of living. Hopefully you've already been doing this over the past decade plus, when times were good. FIRE.
2. Don't use AI to write code. Write code yourself, as you've always done. Then, just see how long you last at work. If AI truly progresses, then long term most programmer jobs as we know them today are going to disappear. So worst case you will be let go a little earlier than your peers.
The devs using AI to write all their code are going to suffer major or complete atrophy of their coding skills. It's only been about a year of this and we're already seeing it occur. Maybe this doesn't matter long term and manual coding is truly dead, or maybe it comes full circle and we get back to programmers programming, in which case you will have a massive leg up on the NPC "programmers" who haven't written code in years because they surrendered their craft -and brain- to AI agents.
by greenowl - Came to the same conclusion as your point number one. Yes, i don't love my job anymore. It is painful, but... most of the people living like this their whole life and i was blessed to do what i love. And i still have well paying job, so i can retire earlierby bah9
- Been programming since 12 (now 44). I still remember the pure joy of writing the QBasic and Turbo Pascal programs to draw random colored pixels at random locations on a mode 13h or interface with a sound blaster.
Went through this identity crisis super strong about a year and a half ago.
I feel like I'm mostly over it now. The surface area of interesting things to learn seems ever expansive. It's fun to find the frontier and the spaces where the models still struggle, and then work together to overcome a hurdle and achieve something neither of us could have achieved individually.
I suppose that frontier too will thin and eventually vanish.
For now though I think it's best to take whatever time you need to be nostalgic, but then realize how awesome it is to get to be a programmer at this inflection point.
by rboyd