> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
as long as there are things in and our lives to improve, there are opportunities to build great companies that provide a lot of value
i dont think those exist purely in software anymore- but if you look around at say, the skyrocketing number of elderly and nursing homes (just as an example) there are probably dozens of ways to improve lives and make a good living there
and electronics and hardware has always been so difficult and expensive to get into- but with new infra and workflows and 3d Printing and getting stuff from China- it's vastly cheaper and easier to do a robotics or hardware startup than 20 years ago
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
Agreed. I think there are people who like coding for the sake of it, akin to solving a puzzle. Then there are those who like building, and coding is a necessary step in that. The former are sad, the latter are happy.
It's not a dichotomy, though. I loved coding for the sake of it. I found it relaxing, meditative, and I was very good at it. I also like building things where coding is a necessary step.
And while I don't go all in on the notion of revealed preferences, a few facts stand out to me:
1. Nothing is actually stopping me from writing code by hand for fun, but I don't
2. There is no practical reason to manually write homebrew SNES games in assembly language, but some people do
3. I still have no deficit of fun problems to dig into, to sit and ponder, and then experiment with. They just aren't coding problems, and I have far more powerful tools to help me navigate prior art, test out hypotheses, and so on.
I’ve got a foot in both worlds and I feel pretty discombobulated. It’s amazing to be able to build whatever I imagine, but I also feel like something I loved has been taken away from me.
I keep thinking it would be interesting to do a series of interviews with software engineers on how they’re dealing with this change.
This seems overly reductive. I’m firmly in the second camp, I don’t enjoy typing code, I want to be solving real world problems, not riddles. But I don’t consider a problem solved until I have understood it entirely, until I’ve anchored that new piece of understanding within my mental model of the domain, until I feel like I’m able to deploy that knowledge on demand and build upon it.
Working with AI tools the way many people seem to be doing it (multiple sessions at once, not even reading the output, rubber-stamping MRs) makes me anxious and paranoid, and it’s definitely NOT because I miss punching in if statements.
I didn't mean to make the options seem mutually exclusive, you just typically hear from one side or the other but there are plenty of people in the middle.
I like both. From an economic perspective I'm a little sad my programming skills give me less of an edge in the job market, but I still hand program here and there for fun.
There are certainly people that are a mix of both, i lean towards the latter group, but still enjoy the feeling of being lost in the flow of certain tasks. What i lost was the hard problems, instead of considering how to solve those problems, that time is spent thinking up the next features or whatever, its a funny pivot and certainly pushes me towards being more of a generalist.
I still wouldn't say im "happy" with the current state of things though, despite mostly fitting in that latter group. AI is still fairly tiring to interact with, and everything feels contested. If its not contested, it feels like putting almost anything out there... means it will become contested when certain people see it and decide "that is a solid idea", and just throw agents at mirroring it.
I’m in the former group and I’m happy. I don’t think many people enjoy all coding. I like working on intricate details of difficult systems. I don’t like screwing around with build systems or writing a bunch of tests that are almost but not quite the same in order to cover all cases. I get to do what I like and delegate what I don’t.
This dichotomy keeps coming up, but I think there are actually three phases of making, and three phases of pleasure, and people keep overlooking the third phase:
1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.
2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.
3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.
So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.
But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.
And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.
I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.
I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.
What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.
Now that's going to happen with software development.
It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
It reminds me of object oriented programming. There was a time when OO was going to revolutionize everything. Ordinary people would make their own programs. Programmers would 10x their productivity. Companies sprinkled it in their marketing materials the way they do “AI” today. People put it on their resumes.
It didn’t revolutionize everything but it did quietly take over. Almost every production language has some version of it and pretty much everybody uses it.
LLMs are changing rapidly so I won’t even try to speculate about where they’ll end up, but that’s how it looks now.
Hoping when J2EE/Java Beans of the late 2020's consultants from Accenture takes over and makes a million ClaudeHelloWorldFactoryBuilder, there will be a profitable niche in the Haskell and Erlang of 2020's for the rest of us!
> Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me.
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain "the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion".
AI has confronted me with the reality of some of my ideas.
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
There's an initial AI mania stage. It's when someone starts using AI to code and they come to think that they now have superpowers (and to some extent they do). I certainly had that mania and to some extent still do. There's a frenzy of working on 3 or 4 projects at once that's exhilarating. Even right now I've got Claude working on a couple of different projects and GLM-5.3-flash working on another. But I have to wonder how much of this stuff I'm co-creating with AI will actually get used.
I wonder if the next addicting tech will be AI mania like you described. Rather than folks watching videos picked by the algorithm as a kind of addiction, folks will be "building" all day addicted to making things with AI. In the AI silo you're a super genius as it eggs you on to keep building
That's the thing. There's no point in sharing most of the results anymore. When and if someone needs a version of this, they will likely need it to be slightly different. By then the model will have trained on your session and be a bit better in general.
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
You're discovering that effort doesn't matter, only results.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished reult felt so hollow. To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you out into sometying. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't.
Cheapen to whom? If you're building software for yourself I don't think this matters a whole lot as long as its valuable to you
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
Essentially no actual product that users will pay for can be one-shot with a prompt. But you can dream bigger and do harder, more valuable things.
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
I'm doing the same thing as op and at least for me no; There are soooo many details i like to have changed, it doesn't feel like its just slop.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
> Right now, we have (most of) my undergrad classmates' dream industry. They drink constantly [1], skip lectures, scrape by on their homework with AI, complain about classes, grind Leetcode to get internships, and eventually get their diploma. It must feel like walking around in a literal dream, where your footsteps have no weight, like Wile E. Coyote near a ledge.
There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].
In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.
In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.
When I went to college for CS, I was on a scholarship that required I keep my GPA. To have a little insurance for that, every semester I took a random extra easy intro class. That way, if I was bombing a hard class, I could drop it to keep my GPA while still being a full-time student.
One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.
I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.
I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.
I agree, and I can provide a mechanism too - competition. AI makes imitation easier, anything you can point your agent at can be reimplemented with much less effort than the original took. So it becomes harder to stand out, we are losing our distinctiveness, our differentiated positions. And that is all we had.
A company, a product or job seeker the all need the same thing - to be picked - why would you pick me? That question is harder to answer today than in 2020. So it becomes a "musical chairs" moment. Everyone is panicking and scrambling for their own seat. This is how we get "new opportunities that didn't exist before" - we will strive to create new ways to differentiate ourselves. We could spend an enormous energy on that goal. But we can't predict what they will be no more than we can predict where the ball will be 1 minute later on the football field, it depends on what everyone else is doing.
I don’t think many people are worried that there won’t be problems to solve. Many people are worried that people will be devalued in extremely consequential ways as they have been in the past. A lot of human misery lurks in the eddies caused by innovation and so many people in the software business have been so comparatively coddled compared to the rest of the workforce that they can’t viscerally understand the implications of that. The hubris inherent to the tech world prompts many to reject that fact out-of-hand. There will be some people that travel the happy path through this change, but I think it’s a fraction of the number of people that actually will, and I think technologists will be disproportionately marginalized.
Maybe compilers? instead of using them to make 1950s software faster, we used the abstraction they created to build vastly more complex systems like operating systems, browsers, cloud platforms, and modern games. AI could be another jump in abstraction, making software possible that would previously have been too expensive or complicated to build.
Indeed. As much as I should find it fascinating, it does indeed often suck, emotionally.
But I gather from reading this that you are young.
The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.
If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.
This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.
Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.
(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)
3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons
In all fairness I think this was hyperbole. Those roles are hard for anyone from any school to get, and they seemed biased against hiring newgrads anyway.
Ya as much as i appreciate the real writing from a young person, unless they have connections they are likely all in for rude awakenings once they are searching for a real job. knowing how to reverse a linked list wont save anyone from the current state of the job market for juniors.
I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
> Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
I don't think the person you are replying to meant everyone won't survive as of literally today.
We're still in a somewhat calm period where something fundamental changed in the world but it changed so fast most people have barely reacted to it as of yet so things feel relatively normal, but with a growing sense that they aren't.
In the beginning of 2025 if anyone suggested "You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive" most people on HN would have laughed at it, even the people who were considered AI-pilled for the time.
Today that sort of claim may spark some debate and some people are clinging to denial, but nobody who actually uses this stuff is laughing it off anymore. Even the staunchest deniers recognize there is enough to be concerned about there that it isn't a joke anymore.
Right, but iteration has become cheaper. If one gives Claude a shitty prompt and it does a shitty job, one will know soon. Then they can refine the prompt and get to where they want to be.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
I'm scared to find out what systems built using that methodology will be like.
Product design is mostly saying no to ideas. And occasionally yes, but only to a very select cohesive set.
Most people are terrible at that - though I think it's learnable to some extend. And at least current-day agents will generally just do whatever dumb shit the human says it wants.
I expect you’ll find the outputs of those processes to be entirely unconscionable and, baffling, the users will not see a problem with it. Eventually you will conclude that it’s not a lack of information or a resignation to their fate; it is much like the pigs, who just like playing in mud. (This is how I’ve felt twice now, first about AI writing, and then about AI code.)
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
When it comes to trades it's also a bit of "most people do not want to do this job because it's unglamorous"
Many people would choose not to be a plumber for various reasons. A shocking number of people seem to deem manual work as beneath them. Many others just prefer to do other work.
I have no problem doing plumbing or building. I've installed floors, ceiling fixtures, drywall, whatever. But I am best at software and would prefer to do that for my career.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
You think all companies are going to vibe code and then vibe maintain for years and years all the software they require to do a business that has nothing to do with software? And you think the LLM is going to do it itself?
For most yes, but the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft. AI is like a sledgehammer. It can demolish technical challenges and it can follow patterns but is still completely blind to the "why".
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
In a way its worse- nothing is stopping claude from decompiling all the things- and then adding the source code it decompiled to the training data, as if it was just another github to crawl. So if one of your installers is out there- you have provided the perfect example of something working.
That's true, but the installers for most of the really valuable proprietary native software are still locked behind paywalls. (Some have been leaked.)
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
Right now, I can definitely prompt Claude better than my customer. Claude's abilities, when steered, are definitely impressive, but I have never seen it correctly architecture around a problem unless explicitly critiqued.
i've been experiencing this as well. It does however make me think that maybe the code architecture doesnt matter if nobody is going to read the code. Like maybe the focus should be on better tests and metric tools to determine quality of code (i.e. performance) along with other tests for security, and then let the code look like whatever claude uses to match those targets.
But I can probably prompt Claude better than your customers too, so can at least 50 of the people I know (advantage of a tech heavy social circle). Good luck turning your prompt into a business when me and 50 of my friends can replicate your business model in about 10 second. Don't believe? Go ask Jev devs how they feel about Clef.
Yeah and anthropic can't train Claude better than anyone else either so no moat there either. Knowledge is not scarce it just takes work to uncover once uncovered it is not useful if not published. If published it can't be owned.
How does that make sense? The expertise is what allows me to tell the LLM what to do in the first place, inspect its outputs, and iterate, which is still faster than coding by hand.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
Just because the job becomes obsolete doesn't mean the employee has to. Some employees have adapted to different jobs and roles many times in their careers.
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier
I used to think this around 10 years ago. I eventually learned this kind of thinking is defeatist and figured if others are able to succeed in this environment then I can.
> there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.
Just like how people think ideas are a dime a dozen, software will be. The value will be in polish, ongoing maintenance, feature development, and the incorporation of customer feedback.
> I can't think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better
Users are notoriously bad at noticing small improvements over time. A more interesting thing way to see the impact of AI is to ask employees at big companies what it has allowed them to work on and release in a previously unimaginable time frame.
> Just because the job becomes obsolete doesn't mean the employee has to. Some employees have adapted to different jobs and roles many times in their careers.
But that employee will be on a treadmill and has to reinvent themselves in an ever-increasing pace because the AI is continuously hunting for their job, and its ambitions are growing exponentially.
I hadn’t considered the language similarities between some sects of AI boosters, particularly in the AI art realm, and incels. The persecution complex, pseudo social justice jargon, the extreme tribalism, and other greatest hits seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
> It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.
It hurts my heart too :) I thought it was something I had to push through, I was wrong.
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
This advice helped a lot of students I interacted with - hypes come and go, observe them but think about yourself in 10 years, invest into your skills, even if that means writing web pages manually for the sake of learning. Think about all those who invested into UML code generation, Java EE frameworks instead of core skills.
I'd go easy on them, they're a student with what is almost certainly a very bizarre view of the world from that POV right now.
It doesn't sound very different from when I was in undergrad an eon ago, except substitute "AI" with "blatant and rampant cheating" and "openAI offer" with "google" or "facebook"
Very, very few people like their programming jobs. There's absolutely no "love of the craft", "construct software" or artisan bullshit going on in the vast majority of jobs. So while AI may take jobs away, it won't take much joy from the remaining jobs on average. It will both degrade the job for those who like line-by-line coding and long debugging sessions while improving for those who don't like that.
You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.
AI burnout is real. I personally chose to ignore latest developments until last Christmas, and then heavily started using coding agents, and recently, harness engineering. Even then, I refuse to follow latest updates, but only identify what really is useful and sustainable, at least in short term.
After recently pushing agentic apps to production, my impression is that agentic AI is here to stay and domain knowledge is more important than ever. Real expertise is required for context engineering and harness engineering. You have to think ten steps ahead now if you really want to turn stochastic output of an LLM into something reliable and flexible. Domain expertise is needed to identify workflows which were previously impractical but can now be achieved using the reasoning* capabilities of an LLM.
In my 20 year career I've seen trends come and go. Every few years, some skill upgrade was necessary, and AI is just another push towards that.
it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.
A shameless plug, but it is exactly why I made developerpoetry site. I feel sad about the time that has passed and never it will be as it used to be. Sometimes writing something makes it better.
> If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
For me it removed all motivation for side projects, just give my wishes to the replicator machine.
Additionally the ongoing experience with iPaaS agentic platforms removed the desired to invest into additional programming languages unless they are required for project delivery.
I guess it is ok for those that rather be solution architects or program managers of a little bots team.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
There was a massive and permanent rise in mass-market beer prices (and margins) after the "microbrew" era, and a huge drop in the costs (in risks to your safety and freedom) in smoking pot.
I think that the inflation wave has caused cheap beer to bring its prices back to earth Dollar Menu-style. For a long while there was simply no cheap beer.
why this is a good thing?
alcohol it's not the only thing people throwning their lifes. As for myself, Gen Z member, I'm never drinked at all, but this doesn't mean my life or even health is better.
> Now there's no such thing as a startup, there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.
The AI hype and AI doom are 2 sides of the same coin. Yes you can make a cool demo quickly with a prompt, but building a real company with moats is still possible, much easier even. The moats have just changed: proprietary data, distribution, access rights, eval sets, integrations, compliance, brand, just not the code.
> As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
Very good point. I too feel that these tools have made creation far more accessible. I’ve always been a person who’s been strong at assembling existing pieces into something, but at the same time not great at making the pieces.
It’s liberating, as you say, but at the same time I feel guilt for building when I know I’m really standing on the shoulders of giants, maybe undeservedly.
It's not okay to ask the world to slow down so you may catch up. It's not okay to ask for the rim to be lowered so you can dunk. Instead, ask how you can get faster, how you can get stronger, and actually get the ability to dunk.
> Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like
I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.
So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.
LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.
I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.
Why does it make you sad? Twitter as a concept is a technically superior platform to keep up with news about interesting things you like. Short-form, multimedia integrated, your own curated timeline. It is literally the perfect platform for following artists, musicians, game developers, programmers, whatever, and seeing what they're up to, vs. trying to follow 100 blogs. Unlike RSS, it is interactive, allowing people to communicate and form connections, and the entire "retweet" thing makes people creating cool things immensely more discoverable, allowing more eyes to see their cool work.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
Twitter was never good. It was always a toxic place thanks to the super short character limit, which pushes people to make punchy hot takes rather than communicating with some nuance.
It was only as toxic as you allowed it to be, because you had control of the content you saw. If you used Twitter for politics, you were basically very stupid and any unpleasantness you endured was entirely self-inflicted. You could just... not do that. A global platform is going to have some wackadoos on it but you don't have to associate with them.
The other day I was trying to read some article (tutorial of sorts) and it was just slop after slop after slop, it was in that LLM language which I can't describe but it just felt like ChatGPT wrote the whole thing, art music literature made by humans is what I look forward to
As for the programming part, programming has always been a creative field and I don't feel it has been "ruined" by AI, it's just that a lot of people have suddenly unlocked a dimension of sorts where they can explore their creativity without having to go through all the syntax, structures and nuances associated with programming
1) the mass proliferation of low-effort content. A thing can be implemented quickly and correctly but still be badly designed. When people say "oh this will go away as the models improve", I think they are making a category error. The AI cannot read your mind.
2) we really have no idea what to do about how this transforms society. As a result, the debate has been captured by quasireligious doomsday cultists and self-interested accelerationists. Obviously we should improve our cybersecurity and synthetic biology regulations (although I'm a skeptic on the bioterrorism risks). But we had no idea how much time people would pour into social media feeds when they were invented. I am sure we will be careless with this technology as well in this 2nd gilded age.
> But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.
I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.
Basically a lot more time spent on "how should this work?" vs before a lot more time spent on "how can this work?"
I see people on LinkedIn with little programming skills getting high-paid prompt engineering jobs as developers. There's messages every day from these accounts talking about how prompting is the way of the future.
I hope it's like those highly paid html coding jobs (where this is your only skill) in the 90s and these people get booted within a few years.
My problem with AI is not the technology. It's people attempting to shortcut knowledge and skill and act like it Trumps years of experience in the industry.
When everyone can prompt, the only high paying jobs left will be the people with actual experience.
We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now to work on all the cool ideas I've always had but never had the time and money to finish. You used to have to go to VCs and raise millions to do things you can now do for cheap as a hobby.
I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.
If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.
I feel the same way. I was trying out the new ChatGPT voice the other day and had this exact same thought. AI _still_ is blowing my mind often, even though it's been around for years.
I probably could have beared with it if it was only limited to programming, but it showing up in creative fields has made me feel all sorts of negative emotions. I hate that I can't even enjoy any fanart without trying to check if it might be AI generated, I hate that I always have to check for an AI GENERATED DISCLOSURE on any new game on steam. And some aren't even honest about it, and look down at artists.
Some context - I'm a frontend dev and I've lost all interest in work, I just see it as a way to pay my bills now. I'm trying to practice drawing because I want to draw fanart of my favourite characters, and I want it to be meaningful. I've already dabbled with stable diffusion back in the day and I got bored of it because it was just way too easy and didn't require any effort, and thus it didn't feel any rewarding either.
I don’t think there’s enough reporting or discussing on the existential crisis that is happening in the first world as a result of accessibility of AI technologies.
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
AI feels like it’s happening to people where as the internet felt like people were making it happen.
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
It's a thing inherent to thinking, language, machines and computers.
The thing is, it looks like life but it really isn't.
That fact is being rubbed in our face now. Treat it like life and it will make you sick, sooner or later.
Sooner now, because of AI. So thank AI for making the badness more immediately visible before it can do more damage. So you spit it out immediately instead of swallowing it for years.
'Bro' - you were never going to be a Silicon Valley startup guy even before AI.
I hadn't realized people were already looking through inherited-nostalgia glasses back at 2016.
Instead you'd have written a post complaining about the ad-tech space - which is still a deep pit of human depravity and unhappiness mascaraing as a positive on society.
The value-add startup you're imagining still exists. Just not anywhere near the bubble where people are talking about wanting 500k salaries.
I love AI. OK, OK... maybe that's a overly broad statement. I do have concerns about the long-term implications of advancing AI, and I do mostly prefer not to engage with 100% AI generated content (Youtube videos that are fully AI generated, AI-written blog posts, etc).
BUT. As far as using AI goes, I think it's great. And I'm not just talking about coding. In fact, coding is a small part of it for me. I mainly value AI tools like ChatGPT / Gemini / etc. for their value as:
1. Tutor
2. Lab assistant (more on this in a sec)
3. Research assistant / intern
4. Humor generating interlocutor (more on this to come)
To point 1... ChatGPT is amazing as a tutor and teacher. Pretty much anything I want to learn more about, I can ask it to give me a summary, then drill down on specifics, and then ask it to quiz me. And I can do this over and over and over and over, and it never gets tired, or bored, or frustrated. And I can do this at 2:00 in the morning when some random idea sparks in my head. Even more, if I'm reading a print book (something I still do a lot of) and I encounter, say, a bit of math notation that I'm unfamiliar with (this happens quite often), I can take a picture of the page, put it in the chat, and ask the AI "what's the deal with that notation in the third paragraph on this page?" and BOOM ... I get an explanation. And then I can just randomly have it quiz me on stuff as sort of a "poor man's Anki" (don't worry, I still use actual Anki as well).
To point 2... I've recently been doing some research in the area of neuromorphic computing. Now just to be clear, when I say "research" I mean really entry level stuff, not groundbreaking novel research. Think "lab section of an undergrad science class" level stuff. But in that regard, ChatGPT has been a god-send. It has explained SO many things to me about something as simple as using my oscilloscope, that I'd never bothered learning before. And it helped me with some Python / PyVisa code to control my test equipment to automate some experiments using SCPI over LXI. And I can upload screenshots from my oscilloscope and it can analyze the waveforms and point out interesting details, notice my mistakes, see small things that my eyes can barely pick up on, etc., and MUCH faster than I can. My next plan is to set up an MCP server to let it actually query/control the test equipment using SCPI.
To point 3... I recently gave it a task like this "I was watching a Youtube video where the presenter mentioned that when she first got into neuromorphic computing as a grad student she read 3000 research papers. I want to treat that as the floor for myself, so go find me at least 3000 relevant papers related to neuromorphic computing / neuromorphic electronics / spiking neural networks / etc." And BOOM.. a few minutes later I had a spreadsheet listing thousands of papers, including links to publicly available copies where available.
To point 4... this is harder to explain. When I talk to ChatGPT, I don't just "play it straight". I'm a class clown by nature, and I go ahead and let that enter into the conversations with the AI. I joke around about all sorts of shit, make bizarre references to completely unrelated stuff, constantly refer to the Turing Police as though they are a real agency who are watching us, joke about the poor OpenAI intern who has to read through all the transcripts to watch for inappropriate behavior (I don't think that's a real thing, but the running gag continue regardless). And the bot "knows" when I'm joking and *replies in kind*. And it's genuinely funny. I've literally snorted coffee before over something ChatGPT said to me. And it knows about the various running gags that we always engage in: the Turing Police references, the OpenAI monitor, a mysterious character name "Earl" who may or may not exist, and who may or may not have been onboard the USS Eldridge in 1943 in Philadelphia, etc. etc.
One of my favorite moments was when ChatGPT came back with a fictionalized report from the supposed "OpenAI transcript monitor" that included the phrase:
"User and model both appear to be morons."
So yeah, I find it wildly useful and you basically could not pay me enough to give up these tools.
And as a final word: just to be clear, yes, I know enough about how Generative AI works to know that the AI doesn't "really" have a "sense of humor", or a "personality" at least not the same way a human does. I allow myself to anthropomorphize it a bit, because it makes interacting with it more fun and helps the time go by faster so to speak. But at all times I'm fully aware that what I'm talking to is ultimately a program doing inference on a huge neural network, doing vector looks, etc.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
I mean, there are a bunch of reasons one might. Making hugely impactful products can be great for your career, even if you only work there for some time. Maybe you believe you'll be better-positioned to see what's coming. Or cynically you want to make absolute bank so you can hide out in your New Zealand bunker when the AI dictatorship begins or whatever. Or you'd rather be a hammer than a nail, or in this case, the automator rather than the automated.
Or you might believe that superintelligence won't necessarily lead to huge job loss, won't happen that soon, or will bring about the fully automated luxury communist future so it's your moral imperative to be maximally accelerated.
> But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like. As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.
Why would not using tools that you don’t know how to use that don’t have the negative effects that you don’t have experience with make one sad?
This is just complaining. If you don’t like AI, don’t use it. If it makes you sad, don’t spend time blogging and focusing on it. If you think it entails a loss of control, maybe educate yourself before smearing non-issues with tools you have never tried.
> And, seriously, there are so many verified accounts that just post AI-generated replies to popular posts, and we all just ignore them. It's the most insane, Kafkaesque thing. Absolutely nobody likes it. It's an eyesore. And we're supposed to be living in the most powerful age for AI. You're telling me that nobody at SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok/whatever can write a classifier to ban these accounts? I can press a button on any post and be given a full explanation by Grok, a button which I've pressed 2 dozen times on accident and never on purpose. You can't run a decision model for $0.0000001 cents whenever someone hits "Post" and realize that a reply makes no sense?
AI doesn't make me sad but this drives me crazy. I don't want racists banned, I want replies to posts that don't make any earthly sense banned. I want twitter to stop you before a post and say "did you even read the post?" "Are you just posting because you want to participate?" "Banned for nonresponsiveness." "Six other commenters submitted comments almost exactly like yours, are you sure yours in necessary?"
Shouldn't AI have solved this? I can't imagine that it's holding people on the site - maybe it pushes up some badly done interaction metric. But there should be a last AI check before submission: "Are you dumb? If you are dumb, press submit, but I have to warn you that the comment you're replying to has showdumb:off."
While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.
Nah, we won't be engineers in 2 years, we'll be product steward/solution architects/etc, and our job will be to be liability lightning rods and customer/c-suite facing puppets for agents, while trying to add a small amount of taste/style into the outputs.
unless the CFOs can figure out the cost benefit of humans vs robots it might happen.. They might start to question the value of Steve’s $50k/month Claude spend.
Interesting perspective. For those tracking real AI adoption data by profession, channely.co has been collecting metrics that show the human+AI hybrid model is clearly the current winner.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas,
On a great big clipper ship,
Going from this land here to that,
In a sailor's suit and cap,
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town,
And of himself, and those around.
- The Velvet Underground, "Heroin"
i dont think those exist purely in software anymore- but if you look around at say, the skyrocketing number of elderly and nursing homes (just as an example) there are probably dozens of ways to improve lives and make a good living there
and electronics and hardware has always been so difficult and expensive to get into- but with new infra and workflows and 3d Printing and getting stuff from China- it's vastly cheaper and easier to do a robotics or hardware startup than 20 years ago
there will always be opportunities!
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
And while I don't go all in on the notion of revealed preferences, a few facts stand out to me:
1. Nothing is actually stopping me from writing code by hand for fun, but I don't
2. There is no practical reason to manually write homebrew SNES games in assembly language, but some people do
3. I still have no deficit of fun problems to dig into, to sit and ponder, and then experiment with. They just aren't coding problems, and I have far more powerful tools to help me navigate prior art, test out hypotheses, and so on.
I keep thinking it would be interesting to do a series of interviews with software engineers on how they’re dealing with this change.
Beware of survivor bias though.
Working with AI tools the way many people seem to be doing it (multiple sessions at once, not even reading the output, rubber-stamping MRs) makes me anxious and paranoid, and it’s definitely NOT because I miss punching in if statements.
I still wouldn't say im "happy" with the current state of things though, despite mostly fitting in that latter group. AI is still fairly tiring to interact with, and everything feels contested. If its not contested, it feels like putting almost anything out there... means it will become contested when certain people see it and decide "that is a solid idea", and just throw agents at mirroring it.
1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.
2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.
3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.
So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.
But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.
And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.
I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.
I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.
What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.
Now that's going to happen with software development.
There is more to software engineering than just "coding" or "building," and it's not even correct to oppose the two.
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
It didn’t revolutionize everything but it did quietly take over. Almost every production language has some version of it and pretty much everybody uses it.
LLMs are changing rapidly so I won’t even try to speculate about where they’ll end up, but that’s how it looks now.
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain "the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion".
"Ah, I see you are trying to build an amateur rocket, but what do you think of the space elevator I just made?"
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished reult felt so hollow. To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you out into sometying. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't.
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
This is why SAAS is here to stay. Yes, I can one shot it, but then I've got to maintain it, and I want to get on and play with the next shiny thing!
Doing things for me, awesome, that works. Doing things that have an expectation from a third party, not so fun.
If you build something, sit with your users, listen, build community etc. I don't think that cheapens the final product.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].
In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.
In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.
It's a psychologically difficult time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.
I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.
I think this is very true but I'm not excited about it!
A company, a product or job seeker the all need the same thing - to be picked - why would you pick me? That question is harder to answer today than in 2020. So it becomes a "musical chairs" moment. Everyone is panicking and scrambling for their own seat. This is how we get "new opportunities that didn't exist before" - we will strive to create new ways to differentiate ourselves. We could spend an enormous energy on that goal. But we can't predict what they will be no more than we can predict where the ball will be 1 minute later on the football field, it depends on what everyone else is doing.
But I gather from reading this that you are young.
The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.
If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.
This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.
Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.
(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
I don't think the person you are replying to meant everyone won't survive as of literally today.
We're still in a somewhat calm period where something fundamental changed in the world but it changed so fast most people have barely reacted to it as of yet so things feel relatively normal, but with a growing sense that they aren't.
In the beginning of 2025 if anyone suggested "You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive" most people on HN would have laughed at it, even the people who were considered AI-pilled for the time.
Today that sort of claim may spark some debate and some people are clinging to denial, but nobody who actually uses this stuff is laughing it off anymore. Even the staunchest deniers recognize there is enough to be concerned about there that it isn't a joke anymore.
Steve Jobs built an empire around the idea that the customer is generally terrible at specifying a particular solution.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
Product design is mostly saying no to ideas. And occasionally yes, but only to a very select cohesive set.
Most people are terrible at that - though I think it's learnable to some extend. And at least current-day agents will generally just do whatever dumb shit the human says it wants.
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
Many people would choose not to be a plumber for various reasons. A shocking number of people seem to deem manual work as beneath them. Many others just prefer to do other work.
I have no problem doing plumbing or building. I've installed floors, ceiling fixtures, drywall, whatever. But I am best at software and would prefer to do that for my career.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
Just because the job becomes obsolete doesn't mean the employee has to. Some employees have adapted to different jobs and roles many times in their careers.
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier
I used to think this around 10 years ago. I eventually learned this kind of thinking is defeatist and figured if others are able to succeed in this environment then I can.
> there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.
Just like how people think ideas are a dime a dozen, software will be. The value will be in polish, ongoing maintenance, feature development, and the incorporation of customer feedback.
> I can't think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better
Users are notoriously bad at noticing small improvements over time. A more interesting thing way to see the impact of AI is to ask employees at big companies what it has allowed them to work on and release in a previously unimaginable time frame.
But that employee will be on a treadmill and has to reinvent themselves in an ever-increasing pace because the AI is continuously hunting for their job, and its ambitions are growing exponentially.
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
But you could sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a REPL (bash, python). Maybe the coding agent is also worthy, but differently.
I have plenty of vibecoded projects. I didn't know it was that easy.
Dear: startups and FAANG: please send offers.
Not sure I'm gonna make it past paragraph one tbh.
It doesn't sound very different from when I was in undergrad an eon ago, except substitute "AI" with "blatant and rampant cheating" and "openAI offer" with "google" or "facebook"
You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.
After recently pushing agentic apps to production, my impression is that agentic AI is here to stay and domain knowledge is more important than ever. Real expertise is required for context engineering and harness engineering. You have to think ten steps ahead now if you really want to turn stochastic output of an LLM into something reliable and flexible. Domain expertise is needed to identify workflows which were previously impractical but can now be achieved using the reasoning* capabilities of an LLM.
In my 20 year career I've seen trends come and go. Every few years, some skill upgrade was necessary, and AI is just another push towards that.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
Additionally the ongoing experience with iPaaS agentic platforms removed the desired to invest into additional programming languages unless they are required for project delivery.
I guess it is ok for those that rather be solution architects or program managers of a little bots team.
That's so true!
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
That was true a couple years ago, but now they are picking up. Maybe they were just broke.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7324161
I think that the inflation wave has caused cheap beer to bring its prices back to earth Dollar Menu-style. For a long while there was simply no cheap beer.
The AI hype and AI doom are 2 sides of the same coin. Yes you can make a cool demo quickly with a prompt, but building a real company with moats is still possible, much easier even. The moats have just changed: proprietary data, distribution, access rights, eval sets, integrations, compliance, brand, just not the code.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
It’s liberating, as you say, but at the same time I feel guilt for building when I know I’m really standing on the shoulders of giants, maybe undeservedly.
I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.
So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.
LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.
I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.
Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
1) the mass proliferation of low-effort content. A thing can be implemented quickly and correctly but still be badly designed. When people say "oh this will go away as the models improve", I think they are making a category error. The AI cannot read your mind.
2) we really have no idea what to do about how this transforms society. As a result, the debate has been captured by quasireligious doomsday cultists and self-interested accelerationists. Obviously we should improve our cybersecurity and synthetic biology regulations (although I'm a skeptic on the bioterrorism risks). But we had no idea how much time people would pour into social media feeds when they were invented. I am sure we will be careless with this technology as well in this 2nd gilded age.
I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.
Basically a lot more time spent on "how should this work?" vs before a lot more time spent on "how can this work?"
Maybe this is what makes you sad
Excitement. Fear of job loss. Fun at vibecoding toys. Worry about falling behind. Apprehension about how society will deal with this
I hope it's like those highly paid html coding jobs (where this is your only skill) in the 90s and these people get booted within a few years.
My problem with AI is not the technology. It's people attempting to shortcut knowledge and skill and act like it Trumps years of experience in the industry.
When everyone can prompt, the only high paying jobs left will be the people with actual experience.
I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.
If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.
Some context - I'm a frontend dev and I've lost all interest in work, I just see it as a way to pay my bills now. I'm trying to practice drawing because I want to draw fanart of my favourite characters, and I want it to be meaningful. I've already dabbled with stable diffusion back in the day and I got bored of it because it was just way too easy and didn't require any effort, and thus it didn't feel any rewarding either.
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
It is all busywork and giving the appearance of an industrial production line to please management.
On the other hand we have spam, blogspam, AI SEO, slop, surveillance, bombing of girls' schools, a bubble, inflation through overspending etc.
It is quite worrisome that you get to influence politicians.
I mean I get it, but if the bubble actually bursts, you are not going to be happy about it, lol.
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged!
The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)
It's a thing inherent to thinking, language, machines and computers.
The thing is, it looks like life but it really isn't.
That fact is being rubbed in our face now. Treat it like life and it will make you sick, sooner or later.
Sooner now, because of AI. So thank AI for making the badness more immediately visible before it can do more damage. So you spit it out immediately instead of swallowing it for years.
I hadn't realized people were already looking through inherited-nostalgia glasses back at 2016.
Instead you'd have written a post complaining about the ad-tech space - which is still a deep pit of human depravity and unhappiness mascaraing as a positive on society.
The value-add startup you're imagining still exists. Just not anywhere near the bubble where people are talking about wanting 500k salaries.
BUT. As far as using AI goes, I think it's great. And I'm not just talking about coding. In fact, coding is a small part of it for me. I mainly value AI tools like ChatGPT / Gemini / etc. for their value as:
1. Tutor
2. Lab assistant (more on this in a sec)
3. Research assistant / intern
4. Humor generating interlocutor (more on this to come)
To point 1... ChatGPT is amazing as a tutor and teacher. Pretty much anything I want to learn more about, I can ask it to give me a summary, then drill down on specifics, and then ask it to quiz me. And I can do this over and over and over and over, and it never gets tired, or bored, or frustrated. And I can do this at 2:00 in the morning when some random idea sparks in my head. Even more, if I'm reading a print book (something I still do a lot of) and I encounter, say, a bit of math notation that I'm unfamiliar with (this happens quite often), I can take a picture of the page, put it in the chat, and ask the AI "what's the deal with that notation in the third paragraph on this page?" and BOOM ... I get an explanation. And then I can just randomly have it quiz me on stuff as sort of a "poor man's Anki" (don't worry, I still use actual Anki as well).
To point 2... I've recently been doing some research in the area of neuromorphic computing. Now just to be clear, when I say "research" I mean really entry level stuff, not groundbreaking novel research. Think "lab section of an undergrad science class" level stuff. But in that regard, ChatGPT has been a god-send. It has explained SO many things to me about something as simple as using my oscilloscope, that I'd never bothered learning before. And it helped me with some Python / PyVisa code to control my test equipment to automate some experiments using SCPI over LXI. And I can upload screenshots from my oscilloscope and it can analyze the waveforms and point out interesting details, notice my mistakes, see small things that my eyes can barely pick up on, etc., and MUCH faster than I can. My next plan is to set up an MCP server to let it actually query/control the test equipment using SCPI.
To point 3... I recently gave it a task like this "I was watching a Youtube video where the presenter mentioned that when she first got into neuromorphic computing as a grad student she read 3000 research papers. I want to treat that as the floor for myself, so go find me at least 3000 relevant papers related to neuromorphic computing / neuromorphic electronics / spiking neural networks / etc." And BOOM.. a few minutes later I had a spreadsheet listing thousands of papers, including links to publicly available copies where available.
To point 4... this is harder to explain. When I talk to ChatGPT, I don't just "play it straight". I'm a class clown by nature, and I go ahead and let that enter into the conversations with the AI. I joke around about all sorts of shit, make bizarre references to completely unrelated stuff, constantly refer to the Turing Police as though they are a real agency who are watching us, joke about the poor OpenAI intern who has to read through all the transcripts to watch for inappropriate behavior (I don't think that's a real thing, but the running gag continue regardless). And the bot "knows" when I'm joking and *replies in kind*. And it's genuinely funny. I've literally snorted coffee before over something ChatGPT said to me. And it knows about the various running gags that we always engage in: the Turing Police references, the OpenAI monitor, a mysterious character name "Earl" who may or may not exist, and who may or may not have been onboard the USS Eldridge in 1943 in Philadelphia, etc. etc.
One of my favorite moments was when ChatGPT came back with a fictionalized report from the supposed "OpenAI transcript monitor" that included the phrase:
"User and model both appear to be morons."
So yeah, I find it wildly useful and you basically could not pay me enough to give up these tools.
And as a final word: just to be clear, yes, I know enough about how Generative AI works to know that the AI doesn't "really" have a "sense of humor", or a "personality" at least not the same way a human does. I allow myself to anthropomorphize it a bit, because it makes interacting with it more fun and helps the time go by faster so to speak. But at all times I'm fully aware that what I'm talking to is ultimately a program doing inference on a huge neural network, doing vector looks, etc.
I mean, there are a bunch of reasons one might. Making hugely impactful products can be great for your career, even if you only work there for some time. Maybe you believe you'll be better-positioned to see what's coming. Or cynically you want to make absolute bank so you can hide out in your New Zealand bunker when the AI dictatorship begins or whatever. Or you'd rather be a hammer than a nail, or in this case, the automator rather than the automated.
Or you might believe that superintelligence won't necessarily lead to huge job loss, won't happen that soon, or will bring about the fully automated luxury communist future so it's your moral imperative to be maximally accelerated.
My sad thought: this tech's primary audience is people who have none of those.
You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY).
You are just throwing a temper tantrum (https://archive.is/YNxJq).
Do not commit blasphemy against AI. (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i...)
Why would not using tools that you don’t know how to use that don’t have the negative effects that you don’t have experience with make one sad?
This is just complaining. If you don’t like AI, don’t use it. If it makes you sad, don’t spend time blogging and focusing on it. If you think it entails a loss of control, maybe educate yourself before smearing non-issues with tools you have never tried.
AI doesn't make me sad but this drives me crazy. I don't want racists banned, I want replies to posts that don't make any earthly sense banned. I want twitter to stop you before a post and say "did you even read the post?" "Are you just posting because you want to participate?" "Banned for nonresponsiveness." "Six other commenters submitted comments almost exactly like yours, are you sure yours in necessary?"
Shouldn't AI have solved this? I can't imagine that it's holding people on the site - maybe it pushes up some badly done interaction metric. But there should be a last AI check before submission: "Are you dumb? If you are dumb, press submit, but I have to warn you that the comment you're replying to has showdumb:off."
This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.