Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.
Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?
The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.
Git doesn't just have warts, its DX is actively bad. If it was good you wouldn't have so many tools designed to make it not suck to work with 20 years after release. The graph first and diff first design decisions are both bad choices that are probably burning millions of man hours per year fixing things that should just work (to be fair, they were the right decisions at the time, times have changed).
It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.
Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.
The issue is with the problem space - version control and reconciliation is hard. The fact we even have software to automate 99% of it is amazing.
Lawyers spend literally hundreds of hours doing just that. Well, their paralegals do.
Git is a legitimately amazing tool, but it can't magically make version control free. You still have to think because ultimately software can't decide which stuff is right and which is wrong.
What about any tool, language, library, or codebase that is unnecessarily complex? Should we never bother to put in the effort to learn to use them? It doesn't mean they are without value to us as programmers. For better or worse, the hallmark of many good programmers I've met is a much higher than average tolerance for sitting down and just figuring out how something computer-related works instead of giving up and routing around it.
Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem in any professional environment.
Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm
You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.
I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.
It's because there are a significant number of us for who tinkering with and building shit is basically a compulsion. And software development is vastly more available, and quicker to iterate and thus more satisfying, than any other tinkering discipline. It's probably related to whatever drives some people to make art, the only difference being that the market has decided that the tinkers are worth a hell of a lot more.
For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.
> I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.
I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you implement tasks fast with shitty code instead of considering the fact that tasks are easy to implement and the code is really fast as a strong evidence that the abstractions were well-chosen.
Thus, I believe that people who just do it for the money have it easier in the "programming industry" than programmers who really love programming, and are thus a big annoyance to managers.
I thus really wonder myself why companies tell all the time about "love for programming" instead of "love for paying the bills" and "love for implementing tasks fast with shitty code", which would give them people who are a much better culture fit for their real organizational processes.
Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees programming as a means to an end and nothing else.
If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this.
That's also how people like me see programming. If the code delivers what we need, then great. Leave it be like that. There are more interesting problems to solve, no need to mess with a solution which is working well.
The problem is that "code delivers what we need" usually translates to "shovel crap as fast as it sells". Combined with heavy monopolization of the software market, where users have very little recourse to being force-fed crap - what are you going to do, go to one other competitor who does the same exact thing? - this means that average software quality in the industry has declined to the point where I would consider shipping it in that state to be actively harmful to the users and to the ecosystem at large (since others then build upon that pile of crap, which of course is a GIGO problem).
Now, you might argue that it doesn't matter because it's not the users who pay you, it's the company. But, well - some people have professional standards. It's rather unfortunate that this is apparently not compatible with "doing business" in this day and age, at least outside of very narrow niches.
The things is most times, you are indeed buying the car that is going to make the delivery. And it's going to live in your garage. And if you're not careful, one day it will drive itself off a cliff, stall in the middle of a 10 hour drive, or you'll get robbed by individuals hiding in the trunk.
People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that crash does happen and they don't know how to recover, so queue up the war room, etc...
Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.
> Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.
How do you mean? If the software works, then it's done. There is no maintenance and it will continue working like that for decades. It doesn't have corrosion and moving parts like a car. Businesses make sure not to touch it or the systems it is depending on.
That would be fine if the dependencies were permanent. Hardware fail and need to be replaced. The OS will be upgraded (macOS is more than happy to make breaking changes). If the software is networked, that’s another transient plane. Libraries will fall out of support range.
Then there’s the fact that the user’s needs fluctuate. Imagine having to pay for a whole another software because the current code is spaghetti and full of hardcoded value and magic constants. It worked, but now you want a slight adjustment, but that can’t no longer be made unless you’re willing to rewrite the whole thing (and pay for it). That would be like having to buy a whole new car, because you moved to the house next door, as the car is hardwired to move only between your old place and where you work.
In my opinion, the OS should not be updated. Not if important software is running on the machine. That's why we see cash registers still using Windows XP.
Sure, if you test it and see that there is no issue with updating, then you can update if you want. But neither the OS or the hardware or anything else should get any priority over the business-crucial software you are running. Even with hardware failures, the better option is to get older hardware for replacement if newer hardware has compatibility issues.
> "...without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills..."
Oh, I wouldn't say that. The hacker culture of the 1970s from which the word hacker originated often poked fun at incurious corporate programmers and IIRC even Edsger Dijkstra wrote a fair bit of acerbic comments about them and their disinterest in the craft and science of computing.
Well, most of them (the hackers from the 70s) probably did do it solely for the love of the game.
We’re 50 years past that now. We’re in the era of boot camps. I feel semi confident saying “most of us” meaning the current developer work force are here for well paying jobs.
Don’t get me wrong I like software development! I enjoy my work. And I think I’d probably like it better than most things I’d otherwise be doing.
But what I’ve been getting at is that I enjoy it for the solving problems part. The actual writing of code itself for me just happens to be the best way to enjoy problem solving while making good money that enables a comfortable life.
To be put it another way, if being a SWE paid a poverty wage, I would not be living in a trailer doing this for my love of coding. I would go be a different kind of engineer.
I think bootcamp era was a decade ago and we're past it now. Not long ago I saw something on here about how a lot of them are closing down and attendance is dropping for the ones still open - likely because of LLMs.
At 47, I am an older guy already. But in my generation, people who went on to be programmers usually started tinkering with code at ~ 11 y.o. (back then on ZX Spectrum and similar cheap beasts available in freshly post-Communist Europe) out of interest and passion, not because of "I want to build a lucrative career".
(Given how massively widespread piracy was back then, programming looked rather like a good way to do hard work for free.)
Money matters, but coders who were drawn into the field purely by money and are personally detached from the substance of the job is an unknown species for me.
"You can also solve problems as a local handyman"
That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.
Additionally in many countries, being a developer is an office worker like everyone else, there isn't SV lottery level salaries.
In fact, those of us that rather stay programmers beyond 30 years old are usually seen as failure, from society point of view, where is our hunger for career and climbing up the ladder?
Now the whole set of SaaS products, with low code integrations, that were already a bit depressing from programmer point of view, are getting AI agents as well.
It feels like coding as in the old days is increasingly being left for hobby coding, or a few selected ones working on industry infrastructure products/frameworks.
> if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast
I don't believe that. When it comes to motoric skills, including dancing etc., I am probably in the lowest quintile of the population.
Of course, I could become somewhat better by spending crazy amounts of time on training, but I would still be non-competitive even in comparison with an average person.
OTOH I am pretty good at writing prose/commentary, even though it is not a particulary lucrative activity, to the degree of being a fairly known author in Czechia. My tenth book is just out.
Talents are weird and seem to have mind of their own. I never planned to become an author, but something inside just wanted out. My first book was published just a few days shy of my 40th birthday, so not a "youthful experiment" by any means.
You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those tech-fetishists that came before you.
Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?
State of the industry both short and medium term is that you want to be the one doing replacing vs being the one being replaced. Not great but this is where we are at. If you are say SRE there are myriad of companies working hard to eliminate SREs but they need experts to set shit up so that SREs are not needed. Same thing will cascade to other Tech work, some faster than others. Career-wise I think it is wise now to position yourself as one that knows how to set shit up for the “great replacement”
Yes we are rapidly moving towards a time where bullshitting will be more valued than deep understanding and problem solving. Both LLMs and the broader culture are pushing in that direction.
It's not an either-or. Doing the replacing with AI means that you're ripe for being replaced yourself. Indeed, what you do until then is likely to have a side effect of training the very model that eventually replaces you.
The real answer to this is collective action - unions etc - to push back against the lowering of the standards by our employees. But software engineers still seem to be broadly allergic to unions.
We all owe every part of everything to those who’ve come before us. That goes without saying, really.
> Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced.
Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod.
I also understand the possibility of all of this potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking my job.
What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?
Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this. The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of petulance + burying head in the sand.
It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than other people.
It was wonderful.
I know you don’t care. So just go to some other forum where you don’t have to endure the whining of us who have lost something that was important to us.
Many of you don't seem to grasp that AI isn't a binary "don't use at all" or "all-in on pure slop" proposition. AI assisted development is not automatically vibe-coding.
Believe it or not, you can actually use these tools to level up your skills and understanding faster and then ship better code! Like with any powerful tool, it requires some care to use it correctly.
A bit harsh off a single post. I like solving problems, not just software engineering problems and I like writing code as a hobby, but I went to this job field only due to high salary and benefits.
In fact, I usually hate writing code at day job because it is boring things 20 out of 26 sprints.
I don't think it is. Labeling passion and love for your work "tech fetishism", is spiritually bankrupt. Mind you we're in general here not talking about people working in a mine to survive, which is a different story.
But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account? That is the fetish, that is someone who has himself become an automaton. It's no surprise they seem to take no issues with LLMs because they're already living like one. Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?
> Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?
Do you understand work-life balance? I get paid to do the job, I satisfy my curiosities in my free-time.
> But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account?
Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love is something that is achievable in our society, at least not for most people.
IMO, the real fetishization here is "work is something more than a way to get paid" that's a corporate propaganda I'm not falling for.
>Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love is something that is achievable in our society,
Which is why I stressed twice, including in the part you chose to quote, that I am talking about people who can achieve that. If you have to take care of your sick grandmother, you don't need to feel addressed.
But if you did have the resources to choose a career, like many people who comment here, and you ended up a software developer completely devoid of passion for the craft you're living like a Severance character. You don't get to blame the big evil corporations for a lack of dedication to a craft. You don't need to work for one to be a gainfully employed programmer, and even if you do and end up on a deadbeat project, you can still love what you do.
This complete indifference to what you produce, complete alienation from work, voluntarily chosen is a diseased attitude.
> The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?
Because in a lot of jobs where you (have to) solve problems, the actual problems to solve are rather "political". So, if you are not good at office politics or you are not a good diplomat, software is often a much better choice.
The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.
It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.
I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people here who fell into software development because it's one of the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into this profession due to getting into programming because it fed an innate need to tinker, and then after they spent a ton of time on it discovered that it was the best way to pay the bills available to them.
I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.
> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.
It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".
I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.
You can spend as much time as you want on "configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments" and otherwise honing your craft, the business machine will still look at you as cogs.
May seem depressing, but the bright side is that you as an individual are then free to find joy in your work wherever you can find it... whether its in delivering high-quality code, or just collecting a paycheck.
> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
> That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value
I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but those statements are subjective, not an objective truth. Lots of people fundamentally enjoy the process of coding, and would keep doing it even in a hypothetical world with no problems left to solve, or if they had UBI.
These are my thoughts exactly. Whenever I use agents to assist me in creating a simple program for myself, I carefully guide it through everything I want created, with me usually writing pages and pages of detailed plaintext instructions and specifications when it comes to the backends of things, I then modify it and design a user interface.
I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy designing (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.
> To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
100% this. I think a lot of the people who are angry at AI coding for them are "code calligraphers" who care more about the form of the thing they're making than the problem that it solves. I can't see how someone's who's primarily solution focused would shed a tear at AI coding for them.
I think the author makes a decent point with regards to 'problem solving' and better tools and how LLM's somehow feel different. Fortran is a better tool, but you can still reproducibly trace things back to assembly code through the compiler.
LLM's feel like a non-deterministic compiler that transforms English into code of some sort.
A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't add value
A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end
This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.
Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?
I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I really like using knives!"), not really about whether the food is better.
I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.
Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have been able to happen without the decade of experience it took you to get to the Staff level engineering position at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the skills required to review the AI code you're producing properly.
I thought it's interesting that GPT5's comments (on prompting it for feedback on the article) seem to overlap with some of the points you guys made:
My [GPT5's -poster's note] take / Reflections
I find the article a useful provocation:
it asks us to reflect on what we value in being programmers.
It’s not anti-AI per se, but it is anti-losing-the-core craft.
For someone in your position (in *redacted* / Europe)
it raises questions about what kind of programming work you want:
deep, challenging, craft-oriented, or more tool/AI mediated.
It might also suggest you think about building skills
that are robust to automation: e.g., architecture,
critical thinking, complex problem solving, domain knowledge.
The identity crisis is less about “will we have programmers” and
more “what shapes will programming roles take”.
Absolutely. But, what if the point of using the knives, is to be able to understand how to use the machines which can use knives for us, and if we're not replicating the learning part, where do we end up?
It's both. Speaking as a user, software quality was already declining before AI coding, but AI seems to have put that process on a fast track now (not the least because of all the top management drinking the Kool-Aid and deciding that they can replace the people they have with it).
A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?
Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!
I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?
But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?
There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.
The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...
Not really even for people running a restaurant. The fast food machine means that a dozen competitors can spring up to compete with most restaurant's niche overnight unless they are serving up something truly special. (And they're not because if they were, the fast food machine would be wholly inadequate to churn out their menu.) Success comes down to other factors like marketing and blind luck winning customers.
I genuinely don't think it's hard to compete. I use AI sometimes, I don't use it more than I use it. I find myself at least just-as-productive as people who primarily use AI.
I personally tire of people acting like it's some saving grace that doubles/triples/100x your productivity and not a tool that may give you 10-20% uplift just like any other tool
This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster was going on about knives, forgetting that the final product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food is inferior, then the food is inferior.
Some of you have never been laid off and it shows.
Intrinsic value is great, where achievable. Companies do not care at all about intrinsic value. I take pride in my work and my craft to the extent I am allowed to, but the reality is that those of us who can’t adapt to the businesses desires will be made obsolete and cut loose, regardless of whatever values we hold.
The issue is that a lot of “programmers” think bike-shedding is the essence of programming. Fifty years ago, they would have been the ones saying that not using punch cards takes away from the art of programming, and then proudly showing off multiple intricate hole punchers they designed for different scenarios.
Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological environment will never devalue their skills. It’s only those who rest on their laurels who have this issue.
To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments
That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.