Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.

I'm teaching my kid what I consider the AI dev stack: AI IDE (Antigravity for us), database (Supabase for us with a nice MCP server), and deployment (Github and Vercel for us). You can make wonderful little integrated apps with this in hours.

Honestly, I have so many features in it now it's hard to describe it, shared work calendar, parts shopping list, recurring maintenance, blah blah blah. It's very bespoke and I doubt anyone else would want to use it the way we do.

In my case I just don't expose them to network at all, any interaction happens through bots in IM or on a tablet at home (through wireguard).

Theoretically locking it down with OAuth on proxy level would also work, but I prefer to keep it off the internet (apart from the tunnel, obviously).

Did you take over a farm?

The only thing Deere "locks down" is that some of the parts have a CANbus address that you need to get a tech over to program the controller to recognize the part, and do the same if you replace a controller.

It's not some nefarious anti-farmer thing, it's because of the way the controller network works. In fact, I've used a CANbus sniffer on the bus and everything on there is in the clear, they don't even encrypt the messages.

The only things I've sent to town to get fixed was because I didn't have time to diagnose it, or it was an insurance claim and I wanted warranty. Blowing $80,000 worth of innards out the back of a combine wasn't a job I wanted to tackle right then (but I probably should have, I wasn't happy with the attention to detail in the repair).

So the upshot is, don't believe every terrible story about Deere you hear. Just the one where they charge too goddamn much for parts.

There is an incredible irony in your typing that out on a device so advanced that it was beyond science fiction when I was growing up 40 years ago.

If you look at Soviet or Chinese Communism, they also stifled innovation, and they also destroyed entire ecosystems. They also had extreme concentrations of power, which allowed psychopathic leaders to commit atrocities.

If we want to come up with real long-term solutions, maybe we need to be honest about underlying human traits, and address those via systematic controls. Otherwise, it feels like we are going to keep bouncing from extreme to extreme. That tendency towards extremes seems like another easily exploited human trait that needs to be identified and addressed.

I guess my point here is that maybe it's not entirely specific systems at fault here, as much as it is universal human traits and group dynamics.

Disclaimer: I thought we had already found the beginnings of an answer, and it was Social Democracy with a regulated market economy. However, this system appears not to be extreme enough for many people to get excited about it.

I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.

How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? Because if someone is on your website using your calculator, they are putting trust in you. If it's wrong, it could have downstream impacts on them. I hope every single one has a comprehensive set of tests with good edge cases. But realistically will they?

I'm actually pretty pro-AI development. But if you're going to use AI to help develop a website, at least focus on quality rather than quantity. AI makes quantity easy, but quality is still hard.

As an aside, the website doesn't even work for me. My clicks don't don anything.

The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.

The value isn’t the interface, it’s the trust that its calculations are accurate. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with accountants and finance people to validate all the calculations.

Would you be asking the same question if it's written without AI? How can any software be always working will all edge cases?

I think the difference is that building 60 interactive calculators manually would force you to do a lot of manual testing. If someone built up that many interactive calculators I would imagine a lot of attention has gone on each one. Why would they spend so much time on something and not test it?

In the end, my feeling is there needs to be transparency in how bulletproof-tested a product is. IMO even a calculator that might be wrong can be useful if it's the most convenient option and the user knows the risks (though to be clear, that is not the philosophy I am employing in my personal project).

- You all should build your own software. AI is so good!

- You all should use the software I built with AI. It's so good!

So it is at least marketed for personal reasons. I don't know why, but it could be for ad revenue, resume filling, ego bolstering.

This is the problem with AI music generation too. Many people actually feel like they made something and are proud, despite just having clicked a button after asking for a result. This gives them some kind of feeling of accomplishment, despite having done absolutely nothing for it.

The title even says so 'I quit, but AI brought me back'. No, it didn't, you're not back, you just paid someone on Fiver a couple bucks and then used his work to pretend you're back.

I have seen that before, so I am not going to touch that.

`Professional Calculators

Free, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for finance, math, and everyday calculations.`

So yeah, fuck this. Website looks 99% similar to the many shadcn themes available, has some errors in the calculations and then have a new account propagating 'ohhh look at me, I did all this with Claude/GPT/my aunt's raspberry pi running X, AI is amazing. All Hail AI.` is tiring and I'm just going to assume it is either paid marketing, people invested directly or indirectly in these companies or just sycophant idiots.

Also, anyone knows an extension or website where I can just filter submissions if they include AI or LLM or Clause in the title? Getting really tired of this shit.

do you understand how bad it is when you search for software and you cannot trust it to do what you ask of it? it's bad!

AI is perfect for building those little tools for you and maybe your family, ones you have no intention of making unicorn startups, but help in your day to day.

You get a bespoke solution and don't need to worry about that free app you found moving to a subscription model when the author wants to profit off it or sells it to a VC company.

It doesn't have to be perfect code, secure or anything else. If it does what it should, it's good.

I’m not an AI hater but I do see this as evidence of LLMs being susceptible to chasing trends as much as people.

Next.js with server rendered React is not a stack that an experienced web developer would have recommended for a “clean” solution to a collection of financial calculators. It’s the answer you’d get if you asked for the stack that’s trending the most lately.

Do you speak with web developers on a daily basis? It seems to be the default stack for everyone to build from from a Saas to a TODO app for the last 5 years or so.

These are all quite reliable well-understood components, and far from "chasing trends" IMO.

Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.

I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.

I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).

Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.

  >  in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.

I believe you can use LLMs as advanced search and as a generator for boilerplate. People liking it easy are also being easy with quality attributes, so anyone should be self aware where they are on that spectrum.

  Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd
  still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it
  puts out.

Thanks.

The context here is it's a HN post about someone being excited about AI bringing them back to coding, in response to a comment on that HN post with someone else being excited about the useful things they've been able to do about AI.

In that context, it's a unique choice to respond with a load of confrontational and rhetorical questions about AI being bad because crawlers and cloudflare outages. It reads like the they just wanted 2 excited programmers to feel bad about themselves for using AI. It's not really the sort of response I'd expect here.

Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you. Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you? Not everything needs to be or should be dumbed down to appeal to lowest common denominator.

Alternatively, go work at a company where you’re part of a team and other people do what you do not enjoy.

> I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time

No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.

The airplane company wont let you vibe code their systems anyway, and rightly so. the rest of us can just do whatever we like.

No one is also keeping me from doing what I want to spend my time with on my days off.

> Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you?

No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects. What a weird question.

> No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.

I guess we have different definitions of "polished" then.

I agree. But those also don’t need:

> intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.

Some of that, sure, but not all of it. Either it’s a weekend hobby project or it’s not, and your description is conflating both. A hobby is something done for fun.

And they're all often a pain to actually do.

And AI makes most of that pain just...go away.

Stop trying to gatekeep what other people do in their free time. No one is forcing you to join them.

thats why it was valuable.

All things worth doing are hard.

This is why we have compilers rather than writing assembly by hand.

I always have a hard time taking this complaint seriously, because the solution is absolutely trivial. Write a snippet. Have you really been out there, year after year, rewriting the same shit from scratch over and over? Just make a snippet. Make it good and generic and save it. Whenever you need to do something repeated on a new project, copy it (or auto-expand if you use it that often) and adapt. Snippet managers are a thing.

The years "away" gave me an unusually clear picture of what problems actually need solving vs what's technically interesting to build. Most devs early in their careers build solutions looking for problems. Coming back after working in a specific domain, I had the opposite - years of watching people struggle with the same friction points, knowing exactly what the output needed to look like.

What I'd add to the "two camps" discussion below: I think there's a third camp that's been locked out until now. People who understand problems deeply but couldn't justify the time investment to become fluent enough to ship. Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.

The $100 spent on Opus to build 60 calculators is genuinely good ROI compared to what that would have cost in dev hours, even for someone proficient. That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space.

Feel like forums have turned into a grand Turing Test.

  > Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.

While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for everyone: get an ad blocker. Your experience of the internet will be radically changed.

I am reminded of this anytime I sit at someone else's computer who doesn't have an ad blocker, or whenever I see internet conversations complaining about ads; I wonder "what ads"? Then I remember: the ads I'm blocking.

So do yourself a big, warm, fuzzy favour and make the internet better for you. Block ads today.

Choose your own ad blocker, obviously.

What, you thought this was an ad for a specific ad blocker, didn't you? Nah, any one will do. Just block bloody ads.

The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.

For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash from their "ad block is awesome" audience, but some well known youtubers in the hard nerdy tech space report 40-50% of views they receive no compensation for.

So you can evangelize how great it is to not have to compensate for content, but don't think it's some kind of everyone wins victory. It's just a cost shift onto someone else, which largely manifests as bad content being needed to cover costs.

The correct approach is paying for what you use, and avoiding ad-supported content to send the message that you want a paid option.

The current landscape is so hostile that I feel it's my moral duty to block everything.

This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma.

Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to.

They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall.

Consumers then are left without the option to pay for an ad-free experience.

But ads are run on hardware the consumer owns, consuming their resources and harvesting personal information on the consumer, which is a security concern.

So even if they want to support content creators by viewing the ads they run, they need to also accept the security trade-off, which many reasonably do not

Ok, so maybe they are suscribing to patreon? Maybe Nebula?

Well those two have conversion rates around (on a good day) 1%.

You can swim in the waters of cognitive dissonance because ads really do suck and ad block is a great way to stop the pain while still getting what you want.

Understand though, the statistics are so damning against the ad-block crowd, that you come off like the people screeching about human generated CO2 being totally fine for the environment (It helps plants grow!) because they cannot imagine having to give up commuting in their diesel monster pick-up truck everyday. (Ad block does no damage because I cannot imagine having to see ads...)

As an aside, ironically, security nightmare ads are really only served to people with tracking blockers, because those people are the lowest value visitors and only scammers/bottom feeders really bid on their views. Regular tech illiterate people get ads for Tide and Toyota. The more you know.

In Bizarro World. In our world, enshitification of the internet is driven predominantly by ads. For example, click bait, more ads and sloppier cheap content are all motivated by the need to create ever more content in order to serve ever more ads.

In the same way, spam blockers don't cause more spam, vaccines don't cause more disease, eating fish deosn't cause more fires, etc.

The internet is shitty in many ways and ads are one reason. You can pay for ad-free streaming but still get low bitrate although you paid enough to cover traffic costs for higher bitrate. You can pay to have ad-free instagram but still see all this shitty AI-generated crap and bot posts. You can pay for Youtube Premium but Google will still massively invade your privacy.

Do you really think that if everybody turned off their ad blockers and paid for premium services, the internet would become better? The way I see it, corporate greed would milk consumers even more.

Instead of surrendering to ads, we should promote directly donating to (or supporting) YouTubers or websites that provide value to us.

No it didn't, in fact, your job shifted from code writer to code fixer

I have a similar experience but its moreso AI lets me build my side projects I only have time to research on, not much time or energy to actually code. I get to review the code and have Claude inspect it (most people I feel dont have Claude do code audits) and tell me where theres bugs, security issues, etc. I do this routinely enough.

If this were about grammar, it would be appropriate to translate something you wrote, not use generative AI to create it.

This whole thing is an ad. All the post's sentiments that people are engaging with ("imposter syndrome" etc.) were spit out by a clanker.

What a disheartening start to my morning.

For myself, I’ve always enjoyed “getting my hands dirty” with code, and the advent of LLMs have been a boon. I’m retired from 34 years of coding (and managing), and never skipped a beat. I’ve released a few apps, since retiring. I’m currently working on the first app that incorporates a significant amount of LLM assistance. It’s a backend admin tool, but I’ll probably consider using the same methodology for more public-facing stuff, in the future.

I am not one to just let an LLM write a whole app or server, unsupervised (I have control issues), but have allowed them to write whole functions, and help me to find the causes of bugs.

What LLMs have given me, is a decreased hesitance to trying new things. I’ve been learning new stuff at a furious rate. My experience makes learning very fast. Having a place to ask questions, and get [mostly] good answers (experience helps me to evaluate the answers), is a game-changer.

> “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” –John A. Shedd

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial?

How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.

There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made.

There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all, to be implemented however, will be the key deliverable.

I have had several projects that look like this already in the VoIP world, and it's been very gainful. However, my industry probably does not compare fairly to the common denominator of CRUD apps in common tech stacks; some of it is specialised enough that the LLMs drop to GPT-2 type levels of utility (and hallucination! -- that's been particularly lucrative).

Anyway, the problem to be solved in vibe coding remediation often has little to do with the code itself, which we can all agree can be generated in essentially infinite amounts at a pace that is, for all intents and purposes, almost instantaneous. If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.

The general business problem to be solved is how to make this consumable to the business as a whole, which still moves at the speed of human. I am fond of a metaphor I heard somewhere: you can't just plug a firehose into your house's plumbing and expect a fire hydrant's worth of water pressure out of your kitchen faucet.

In the same way, removing the barriers to writing 300,000 lines isn't the same as removing the barriers to operationalising, adopting and owning 300,000 lines in a way that can be a realistic input into a real-world product or service. I'm not talking about the really airy-fairy appeals to maintainability or reliability one sometimes hears (although, those are very real concerns), but rather, how to get one's arms around the 300,000 lines from a product direction perspective, except by prompting one's way into even more slop.

I think that's where the challenges will be, and if you understand that challenge, especially in industry- and domain-specific ways (always critical for moats), I think there's a brisk livelihood to be made here in the foreseeable future. I make a living from adding deep specialist knowledge to projects executed by people who have no idea what they're doing, and LLMs haven't materially altered that reality in any way. Giving people who have no idea what they're doing a way to express that cluelessness in tremendous amounts of code, quickly, doesn't really solve the problem, although it certainly alters the texture of the problem.

Lastly, it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? The lack of moat around it was a problem long before LLMs. I, for example, can't imagine making a comfortable living in it outside of SV engineer inflation; it just doesn't pay remotely enough in most other places. Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating. Underappreciated specialist personalities will certainly see a return in a flight-to-quality environment.

Businesses don't pay for CRUD apps, businesses pay for apps that solve problems which often involves CRUD to persist their valuable data. This is often within the sometimes very strange and difficult to understand business logic which varies greatly from one business to another. That is what "CRUD app developers" actually do, so dismissing them as though there is zero business logic and only CRUD is doing them, us, a disservice.

Why, I do plenty of what you describe myself...

Like 80% of jobs outside the USA are either local or outsourced CRUD web applications. Many people live quite well thanks to exchange rates. I wonder what's gonna happen if/when those jobs disappear.

> If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.

My experience as a consultant to business is that they only ever bring in consultants when they need a fix and are in a hurry. No client of mine ever phoned me up to say "Hey, there, have you any timeslots next week to advise on the best way to do $FOO?", it's always "Hey there, we need to get out an urgent fix to this crashing/broken system/process - can we chat during your next free slot?".

> Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating.

I dunno about this - depends on the specialisation.

They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.

Someone with deep knowledge of the insurance industry? Nope - they'll look for a f/timer. Someone with deep knowledge of payment processing? No consultant, they'll get a f/timer.

No, that's fair, and I think you're right about that. But refactoring 300,000 lines 'real quick' isn't going to happen, regardless of that. :)

> They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.

I implicitly had narrow technical specialisations in mind, albeit including ones that intersect with things like "insurance industry workflows".

That's my worry. Might be put off a few years, but still...

For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.

In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.

I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.

Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.

I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.

If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.

A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems.

A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system.

Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.

Despite having worked with or managed hundreds of developers over the years, I don't think there were more than, maybe, 5 that I would not gladly swap for a claude-equivalent. Diligent, able to produce good code when adequately supervised, and devoid of a desire for work life balance :-)

Most software devs are just mediocre, they learn to code late in life, they work 9-5, and often stop learning as quickly as they can.

This is quite true, and it is this -- really, a special case of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- that has me worried about the implications for the labour economy more than anything else.

This is a possibility in very well-trodden areas of tech, where the stack and the application are both banal to the point of being infinitely well-represented in the training.

As far as anything with any kind of moat whatsoever? Here, I'm not too concerned.

The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.

You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides.

Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech.

Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression.

This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?

I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.

Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..

Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?

What are you calling "growth"? Adoption, or LLM progress? LLM progress has objectively slowed down, and for rather obvious reasons. The leaps from GPT-2 to GPT-4 can't be reprised forever.

Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing.

For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.

You're right though about it not choosing some different path, I might or I might not know that.

They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"

Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.

It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.

I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!

Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning up now vs. the Excel code that was being spun up before, but they rhyme.

And to be honest, even the tiny apps I'm doing I wouldn't have been able to do without some background in how frontend / backend should work, what a relational database is, etc. (I was an unskilled technical PM in the dotcom boom in the 2000s so at least know my way around a database a little. I know what these parts of tech CAN do, but I didn't have the skills to make them do it myself.)

Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that and will end up getting unemployed anyway in the next few years.

For me, that is nightmare fuel. We already have too much software! And it's all one framework or host app version update away from failure.

1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day

2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 hours per week to do this in a crappy spreadsheet. Now I have it in a perfect database much more frequently. Dev time: 4 hours.

We are attacking little problems all across the business now.

A MIRACLE!!!!

I wouldn't want to hassle customers who have fully paid up accounts

I guess Vibe coding cleanup firms and offensive security researchers are plotting to find bugs costing firms millions of dollars worth of bugs or one creating a dreadful data breach.

I think also you need to compare it to what was already there. No QA on the humans. Done off the side of their desk with no oversite, process, or checking. Huge amounts of manual errors.

The new solution just needs to be better than the old one, it doesn't need to be perfect.

(But I 100% agree that I wouldn't let AI live against customers. It is helping us build automations faster, and doing a "little" thinking on recommendation rules that would be very hard to implement without something highly structured, which would be frankly impossible in our environment.)

No. The bar is "miracle" and can cure cancer etc and can replace all developers etc. The bar is much higher than existing manual processes. It absolutely needs to be perfection to match the lofty claims

is there a term for that?

AI at our fingertips, accessible and useful, that's just a tool, that's not redefining us as an industry and denying people's jobs – that's an asset. (I used an em dash to prove I am not AI, as apparently double dash is now a sign of AI text!)*

(*) case in point, the situation is _TIRING_.

Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D

"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.

There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)

With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)

In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!

There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.

FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/

Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page

Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects

It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building.

It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.

I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.

Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.

I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.

Not as long as you think.

https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...

Might be never or if the software is not used at all.

The perfect and secure software is none.

Well, at least not connected to the internet?

Most of my job as a security engineer is making offline systems you can actually trust.

And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues

These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both.

I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic.

The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.

Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.

I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).

They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.

I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.

It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.

Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).

I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.

But ya, I was out of work for 9 months and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it up until I realized it was not as easy to find a job as I thought it would be (well, it played out a bit differently but for the sake of brevity I'll stick that story)

I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.

A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.

AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.

I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.

No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation.

Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.

One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.

That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.

The key shift for me: I used to spend hours stuck on syntax, fighting with build systems, or searching StackOverflow for obscure errors. Now that friction is mostly gone. The actual thinking - what to build, how the pieces fit together, what edge cases matter - is still entirely human. But the translation from "I know what I want this to do" to "working code" is dramatically faster.

The compound interest calculator is a good example of something that would've felt like a weekend project a few years ago but probably took you a couple of hours. That's the unlock - not that AI writes code for you, but that the tedious parts stop blocking the interesting parts.

What surprised me most was how much architectural intuition I'd retained even after years away. The fundamentals don't decay as fast as the syntax knowledge.

The author even insists that AI was used because of their poor English, which is the standard excuse on Reddit as well. But clearly, this is not a translation:

> Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?

This is bog-standard AI slop to increase engagement.

Look at the blog on their linked site as well. AI-generated posts.

This has been posted here for SEO. This is a business venture.

It's times like this when I think HN needs a post downvote button. Flagging might not be quite appropriate here, but I hate to see this content cluttering up the front page.

Thankfully LLMs are still very stupid. Especially when it comes to security engineering, my specialty, so looks like I have a while yet.

It’s like using a poorly made steel adjustable wrench. People who know how to use it will low-key hate it (but still maybe find it better than no tool at all), whereas people just using it to smash things because heavy will think it’s pretty much the perfect tool.

With AI, you are no longer a developer, you're a product manager, analyst, or architect. What's neat about this, from a business perspective, is that you can in effect cut out all your developers and have a far smaller development workforce consisting of only product managers, analysts, and architects whom you call "developers" and pay developer salaries to. So you save money twice: once on dev workforce downsizing, and again on the pay grade demotion.

I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.

It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.

This is what I am exploring:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl

Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?

You decided you wanted to focus on speccing out your language and outsource the implementation. That's fine if you want to do that. But let's be honest: you outsourced the bits you considered boring or tedious. Someone else may find that the interesting part, and the experience of outsourcing it rather than building it themselves to be hollow in comparison.

What about the phone in your hand, did you design that?

HN loves to believe they are the noble few - men and women of math and science, driven by nothing but the pure joy of their craft

But this whole AI thing has been super revealing. Almost everyone here is just the same old same old, only that now that the change is hitting close to home, you’re clutching your pearls and lamenting the days when devs were devs

The younger generation born into the AI world is going to leave you in the dust because they aren’t scared of it

My math teacher used to say that people felt this was about…calculators, imagine that

If that's the tradeoff a business wants to make, that's their call. But AI-assisted development really is just outsourcing with a bigger carbon footprint.

The cost of hallucinations though - you potentially have a stronger point there. It wouldn’t surprise me if that fails to sway some decision makers but it doesn’t give the average dev a bit more ground to work with.

I loaded the lowest level piece of software I wrote in the last 15 years - a memory spoofing aimbot poc exploiting architectural issues in x86 (things like memory breakpoints set on logical memory - not hw addresses - allowing to read memory without tripping kernel-level detection tools, ability to trigger PFs on pages where the POC was hiding to escape detection, low level gnarly stuff like this). I asked it to clean up the code base and propose why it would not work under current version of windows. It did that pretty well.

Lower level stuff does of course exist, but not a whole lot IMHO. I would not assume claude will struggle with kernel level stuff at all. If anything, this is better documented than the over-abstraced mainstream stuff.

Like, get real!

I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their software development skills were their capital and take pride in their ability to build stuff. It also wasn't that long ago when the "ideas guys" were a meme here.

We're ceding almost all of our bargaining power because programming "was never valuable." And we're doing it with smiles from ear to ear.

It's not so great for the one or two but fantastic for everybody else.

I can now do more with AI tooling so I enjoy that more.

I know lots of you enjoy coding for its own sake, more power to you. But it's no surprise to me that many (most?) view it as a means to an end.

More likely that step is just skipped and replaced with thoughts and prayers.

Or to phrase it more succinctly: if you are in camp 2 but don't have the passion of camp 1, you are a threat for the long term. The reverse is dangerous too, but can be offset to a certain extent with good product management.

This is solved problem with any large, existing, older code base. Original writers are gone and new people come on all the time. AI has actually helped me get up to speed in new code bases.

Is this also true of all third party code used by their solution? Should they make all libraries and APIs they use their own in exactly in the form it needs to be according to their deep expertise? If not, why not?

If so, does this extend to the rest of the stack? Interpreters, OSes, drivers? If not, why not?