Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were people clinging to instead?

I'd say that the divide seems to come down to whether you want to be a manager or a hacker. Skimming the posts in this submission, many of the most enamored with LLMs seem to be project managers, people managers, principal+ engineers who don't code much anymore, and other not hands-on people who are less concerned with quality or technical elegance than getting some kind of result.

Bear in mind also that the inputs to train LLMs on future languages and frameworks necessarily have to come from the hacker types. Somebody has to get their hands dirty, the "micro" of the parent post, to write a high quality corpus of code in the new tech so that LLMs have a basis to work from to emit their results.

> do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work?

These are not toys. I want to make money. The customers want feature after feature, in a steady stream. It's bad business if the third or fourth feature takes ages. The longer stream, the better financially.

That the code "works" on any level is elementary, Watson, what must "work" is that stream of new features/pivots/redesigns/fixes flowing.

That is an amazing summary. It might not seem that amazing, but I feel like I've read pages about this, but nothing has expressed as elegantly and succinctly.

I do love the former, but it's been nice to take a break from that and work at a higher level of abstraction.

I enjoy both. There’s still plenty of micro to do even in web dev if you have high standards. Read Claude’s output and you’ll find issues. Code organization, style, edge cases, etc.

But the important thing is getting solutions to users. Claude makes that easier.

I very much agree! It feels like it's going to be exceptionally challenging in the coming years to convince non-technical people of the value of true SWE; by that I mean, SWE is not just coding, it's everything around that too.

Or retire and realize the beach forever is not your version of retirement, and get back to it. I spent a week in the Philippines on the beach before getting bored of that and pulling out a laptop and digging into some Linux thing with Claude code, and then now I'm torn between which app to work on to launch.

But then you don't get the same gains in output that agentic modes get you. It just goes off and does stuff, sometimes for hours if you get the loop tuned right.

Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is so 1 year ago. Everyone knows the $20/month plans aren't going to last, time will tell if the $100/month ones do. The satisfaction is now in completing a component and getting to polish it in a way you never had time for before. And then totally crushing the next one in record time. To each their own, of course, but personally, what's been lost with agentic mode has been replaced by quantity and quality.

It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs to angular learning a new framework.

Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can handle that well. I’m taking about the things you can’t easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite.

And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you probably don’t have much protecting you from someone else vibing up a competing replacement either.

Exactly brother, mind if I hug you.

I can play with my 7yo, or help the 11yo with his homework, or go for a run!! - while LLM is cooking a well-spec'ed agentic task. This sounds embarrassing, but LLMs have made our lives healthier, unbelievable.

PS. Not to mention all the "boring" sh*t that I used to postpone/stretch indefinitely, like writng docs or polishing copy for my website... No more stress, no procrastination, just let the LLM do it.

LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that system. And no I don't think they will "get better".

Compilers are deterministic tools. AI is not deterministic. It will tell you this if you ask it. AI then, is not a tool. It is an aide. It is not a tool like a compiler, IDE, editor, etc.

The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.

LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.

If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!

> Their whole skill set

This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.

People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.

Yeah well. That's what we've been doing to other industries over and over.

I remember a cinema theater projectionist telling me exactly that while I was wiring a software controlling numeric projector, replacing the 35mm ones.

If a principal doesn't have the skills to mentor juniors, plan and define architecture, review work and follow a good process, they really shouldn't be considered a principal. A domain expert? Perhaps. A domain expert should fear for their job but a principal should be well rounded, flexible, and more than capable of guiding AI tooling to a good outcome.

> Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens.

[citation needed]

It has just merely moved from "almost, but not entirely useless" to "sometimes useful". The models themselves may perhaps be capable already, but they will need much better tooling than what's available today to get more useful that that, and since it's AI enthusiasts who will happily let LLMs code them that work on these tools it will still take a while to get there :)

I'm optimistic about people being able to build the things they always wanted to build but either didn't have the skills or resources to hire somebody who did.

If we truly value human creativity, then things that decrease the rote mechanical aspects of the job are enablers, not impediments.

I don't understand. You specifically:

> neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt

And then your complaint is that it included a bunch of dependencies?

AI's do what you tell them. I don't understand how you conclude:

> If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist

It obviously doesn't. Why even bother complaining about an AI's default choices when it's so trivial to change them just by asking?

I always tell Claude, choose your own stack but no node_modules.

What's missing is another LLM dialog between you and Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-functional requirements, and instructs Claude appropriately.

We'll get there.

> I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold.

It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one who feels this way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to sonnet 4.6. I’m about to have to start lobbying for more tokens or buy my own subscription because it’s just that much more useful now.

Is this a bot? I feel like HN is dying (for me at least) with all the em-dashes and the "it's not just X, it's Z".

This is correct. Had lunch with a senior staff engineer going for a promo to principal soon. He explained he was early to CC, became way more productive than his peers, and got the staff promo. Now he’s not sharing how he uses the agent so he maintains his lead over his peers.

This is so clearly a losing strategy. So clearly not even staff level performance let alone principal level.

The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me. I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create some insecurity in my mind as well.

However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.

Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.

Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.

Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive.

There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.

> LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything.

They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it.

> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

None of that has anything to do with anything. There's competition between companies to keep prices low and accessibility high.

I think you are simply misunderstanding the word "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW:

> 3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people

Here, it's specifically about making things available to the broad masses of the people that wasn't before.

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of the word.

> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out.

And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive.

> You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource.

> This parroted argument

Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.

I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument.

Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting their slop is the democratic future you wish for?

How many (job) positions do you see today that want a backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your job that is willing to do it.

Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will require even more resources to run, you will have to pay even more for hardware, they will be slower, less responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and pat themselves that we democratized programming, while running towards the future where nobody will be able to own hardware capable of general computing.

> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.

How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.

(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).

I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow betrayed me and canceled promises.

/s, obviously I would hope except I've actually seen this sentiment expressed seriously.

Yeah, exactly. For the longest time those of us who were self taught and/or started late were looked down upon. Before that, same with corporate vs. open source. This is the same elitist and gatekeeping mentality. If LLM coding tools help people finally get ideas out of their head, then more power to them! If others want to yak shave to and do more serious intellectual type of programming and exploration, more power to them!

It goes past software though. That's just the common ground we share on here. A lifetime ago I was a souhd engineer, and knew how to mic up a rock band. I've since forgotten it all, but I was at a buddies practice space and the opportunity came up to mic their setup. so I dredged up decades old memories, only to take a photo and sent it to ChatGPT, which has read every book on sound engineering and mic placement, every web forum that was open to the public where someone dropped some knowledge out there on the Internet for free. So, damned if it didn't come up with some good suggestions! I wish I could say it only made wrong and stupid suggestions. A lot about mic placement is subjective, but in telling it the kind of sound we were after, it was able to tell us which direction to go to get warmer or harsher.

So it's not just software that's coming to an end, everything else is as well. But; billionaires wives will still need haircuts (women billionaires will also need haircuts), so hairdresser will be the last profession.

It does technically democratize the exhilarating experiences of that level of performance. Likely also democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships.

That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems.

Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to publish non-fiction books from a few centuries now. But society still doesn't perceive them as the same at all. A value system is still prevalent and estimated primarily from the writing itself. This is regardless of any other qualifications/disqualifications of authors based on education / experience / nationality / profession etc.

At the individual level too, just because book publishing is easy doesn't mean most people want to spend their time doing that. After some initial excitement, people will go do whatever are their main interests. Some may integrate these democratized skills into their main interests.

In my opinion, this historical pattern will turn out to be true with the superdrug as well as vibe coding.

Some new value will be seen in the swimming or running itself - maybe technique or additional training over and above the drug's benefits.

Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.

It would democratize sports, while making sports worthless and unremarkable. It would collapse the market for sports.

> would you say that it "democratises" sports

Given how I've seen a lot of AI "artists" describe themselves and "their" works, yeah, probably a lot of them would.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web publishing, open-source software, computer hardware) involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the ability to produce those things widened and the cost went down massively, so more people were able to gain access to them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired and a bunch of bike factories popped up, so now everyone can get a cheap bike.

it is more like:

You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it.

Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.

Using physical analogs for virtual things is not the best choice, for example: Would you give a copy of your bike, or copy of your food to your poor neighbor kid if you could copy it as easily and as cheaply as digital products?

Actually he would be very wise, for he then has a bike and can ride it or sell it for money. You have to learn capitalist thinking to succeed in this economy.

The argument for lawyers, doctors and "real" engineers seems like a strawman here.

This discussion is specifically about lowering the barriers of programming and creating using software.

I haven't said anything at all about other professions nor do I think my arguments for democratizing software creation apply to law, medicine, or "real" engineering.

There's also a false equivalence in the software part of your comment. It equates lowering of barriers for recreational/hobby coding with software engineering for serious purposes.

Since you dismiss me as a dogwhistle, I hope my terming your argument as elitist, strawmanish, and full of false equivalences is only seen as fair.

You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.

It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.

Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

If AI completely erases the profession of software developer, I'll find something else to do. Like I can't in good faith ever oppose a technology just because it's going to make my job redundant, that would be insane.

I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to.

But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated them.

So I told him that:

1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it generated and ensure it's still good.

2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But that's not what happened here.

So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few years) "my AI was at fault" – you are ultimately responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately they'll have to delegate to fewer people.

>What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?

I'm assuming that the software factory of the future is going to need Millwrights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwright

But, builders are builders. These tools turn ideas into things, a builders dream.

Just sold a house/moved out after being laid off in mid-January from a govt IT contractor(there for 8 great years and mostly remote). I started my UX Research, Design and Front End Web Design coding career in 2009, but now I think it's almost a stupid go nowhere vanishing career, thanks to AI.

I think much like you that AI is and will just continue to destroy the economy! At least I got to sell a house and make a profit--stash it away for when the big AI market crash happens (hopefully not a 2030 great depression tho). As then it's a down market and buying stocks, bitcoin and houses is always cheaper.

Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?

"One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.

But..cost = revenue."

That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been completely disproven.

You don't charge what it costs to build something, you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.

This scenario is not new with AI at all though? 14 years ago I watched a group of 3 front-end devs spin up a proof of concept in ember.js that has a flashy front end, all fake data, and demo it to execs. They wowed the execs and every time the execs asked "how long would it take to fix (blank) to actually show (blank)?" the devs hit f12, inspect element, and typed in what they asked for and said "already done!".

It was missing years of backend and had maybe 1/20th feature parity with what we already had and it would have, in hindsight, been literally impossible to implement some of the things we would need in the future if we had went down that path. But they were amazed by this flashy new thing that devs made in a weekend that looked great but was actually a disaster.

I fail to see how this is any different than what people are complaining about with vibe coded LLM stuff a decade and a half later now? This was always being done and will continue to be done; it's not a new problem.

It reemphasizes the question of importance. Would a user accept their data needing a AI implementation of a ("manual") migration and their flow completely changing? Does reliability to existing users even matter in the companies plans?

If it isn't a product that needs to solve problems reliably over time then it was kind of silly to use a DBA that cost twice the Backend engineer and only handled the data niche. We progressed from there or regressed from there depending on why we are developing software.

I generally agree; for most organizations the product is the value and as long as the product gives some semblance of functionality, improving along any technical axis is a cost. Organizations that spend too much on engineering principles usually aren’t as successful since the investment just isn’t worth it.

But, I have definitely seen failure due to persistent technical mistakes, as well, especially when combined with human factors. There’s a particularly deep spiral that comes from “our technical leadership made poor choices or left, we don’t know what to invest in strategically so we keep spending money on attempted refactors, reorgs, or rewrites that don’t add more value, and now nobody can fix or maintain the core product and customers are noticing;” I think that at least two companies I’ve worked at have had this spiral materially affect their stock price.

I think that generative coding can both help and hurt along this axis, but by and large I have not seen LLMs be promising at this kind of executive function (ie - “our aging codebase is getting hard to maintain, what do we need to do to ensure that it doesn’t erode our ability to compete”).

* better languages and formal verification. If an LLM codes in Rust, there’s a class of bugs that just can’t happen. I imagine we can develop languages with built-in guardrails that would’ve been too tedious for humans to use.

Hmm. TIL: The real exposure isn't Anthropic, OpenIA claiming your code, it's you unknowingly distributing someone else's GPL code because the model silently reproduced it, with essentially zero recourse for the model owner.

I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property, it's a concept that has long since lived past its usefulness, especially technologically.

How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face?

Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).

I think people can do "buddy vibecodeathons" now. :)

It's nice to be able to either just body double [1], or have some other people around to vent to when Claude goes off the rails.

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-doubling-for-adhd

writing any git command, ever, writing any documentation, ever. writing comments in issue trackers, resolving issues in issue trackers, doing pretty much anything in the terminal, ever… basically every imaginable thing which takes time away from the actual job

Writing unit tests. Modifying existing unit tests to achieve desired code coverage.

Yes. Older people do not become less inquisitive and eager to learn, they just become less open to hype as they've seen whatever younger folks think is the new hot idea several times before, just in different shapes and sizes. However, with AI we're truly seeing something new that we had not seen before (the AI of the 80's, 90's and 2000's was interesting but it never managed to do anything truly generalist - it was mostly able to get good at a very narrow, specific activity, very different from today's LLMs), so I feel just as curious and eager to "learn it" as I was eager to learn, say, Functional Programming in my 20's and Neural Networks in my 30's.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

Fluid intelligence peaks early (20s) but crystallized intelligence peaks much later (50s-60s), and it's not like you can't crystallize a desire to continue to learn, even if you're potentially less creative from a raw intelligence perspective.

I am 50 and the answer is 'yes'.

More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope.

You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.

Absolutely not!

I run a business of giving out loan against stocks and mutual funds as collateral in India.

Please visit https://www.quicklend.in/ to know more.

Engineering Manager (as opposed to people who stick to programming, called Individual Contributor.)

I don't think AI coding means you stop being a craftsman. It is just a different tool. Manual coding is a hand tool, AI coding is a power tool. You still retain all of the knowledge and as much control over the codebase as you want, same with any tool.

It's a different conversation when we talk about people learning to code now though. I'd probably not recommend going for the power tool until you have a solid understanding of the manual tools.

> I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product.

I don't raise a single PR that I feel I wouldn't have written myself. All the code written by the AI agent must be high quality and if it isn't, I tell it why and get it to write bits again, or I just do it myself.

I'm having quite a hard time understanding why this is a problem for other people using AI. Can you help me?

You can use (and create) tools to codify what you think of as "quality".

There's the new frontier for delivering good or the best products. Less relying on the feels of an experienced programmer and more configuring and creating deterministic tools to define quality.

Unless you get actual joy and enjoyment from writing 42 unit tests for a CRUD API with slight variations for each test. Then go ahead =)

That's a really good point. And I agree that kind of confidence in craftsmanship is something that's missing from agentic coding today... it does make slop if you're not careful with it. Even though I've learned how to guide agents, I still have some uneasiness about missing something sloppy they have done.

But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away. When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of the language because it was written by a lot of smart people and has proven itself to be good in production for thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think that's impossible.

Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind that encompasses materializing something into the world to achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be satisfying.

The inherent value of creating is something I was missing. Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's the classic Platonic question about how we value actions: for their own sake, for their results, or for both.

I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its own sake or for its results? Where you land on that spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic coding.

That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about moving up the abstraction chain to work more on architecture and product design. Those things can be fun and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.

    > (i.e. paying for third-party solutions)

Curious about that reasoning : where do you draw the line ?

Are you a builder if there is an middleman ? If not, what if the middleman is a tool ? If you use autocad to build the plans, are you still a builder ? What if autocad has a prompt feature, are you still a builder ?

Also, half of the rooms in the house can’t be accessed because they don’t have a door. And when it starts raining, the house collapses.

> I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.

How do you function on a team, where you have to maintain code others have written?

> I can only truly do that if I write it myself.

That's where you're wrong. AI can debug code better than humans. I put it on a task that I'd spent months on: debugging a distributed application which had random errors which required me to comb through MBs of logs. I gave Claude the task, a log parser (which it also wrote), and told it to find what each issue was. It did the job in a few minutes. This is a task that was, frankly, just a bit above my capacity with a human brain as it required associating lots of logs by timestamps trying to reconstruct what the heck was going on.

My new worry is that I need to make sure the code AI is writing is more comprehensible not to other humans, but to other AIs in the future, since there's very little chance humans will be doing the debugging by themselves given how bad we are at that compared to LLMs even now, let alone in a few years.

> but I should also get something

What do you want beyond a pay check? If you want to get better at your job, the most important technique you can improve right now is hands down how to interact with an AI to solve business problems. The learning you're thinking of, being able to fully understand code and actually debug it in your head, is already a thing of the past now. In a few years, no one will seriously consider building software that's not entirely AI-written except for enthusiasts, similar to the people currently participating in C obfuscated code competitions. I say this as someone who reluctantly started using AI in anger only a few months ago after hating on it before that for the laughable code it was producing just around 6 months ago (it probably was already good by then but I was not really giving it a chance yet).

Sure, but you can feel some emergent philosophies that are starting to converge and there are recognizable aesthetics.

I've always been learning by doing, in the course of making things, in order to keep making, with only a small fraction of looking at what others have done.

> I used to love getting the flow, envisioning the data flows and object structures and cool mechanisms, refactoring to perfection.

You still have to do this, LLM's are still quite bad at choosing the right data structures and dealing with their interdependent relationships.

> SuperSecretCrypt.com

Is down. And the scoring one, no offense, seems like a project a junior would make to pad out their resume/portfolio. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I fail to see how this translates to all the hype being thrown around.

SuperSecretCrypt.com doesn't work.

> And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at?

I was a product manager for 15 years. I helped sell products to customers who paid thousands or millions of dollars for them. I never looked at the code. Customers never looked at the code. The overwhelming majority of people in the world are constantly relying on code they've never looked at. It's mostly fine.

> How do you verify the end result?

That's the better question, and the answer is a few things. First, when it makes changes to my ad accounts, I spot check them in the UI. Second, I look at ad reporting pretty often, since it's a core part of running my business. If there were suddenly some enormous spike in spend, it wouldn't take me long to catch it.

It's thousands of lines of variation on my own hand-tooling, run through tests I designed, automated by the sort of onboarding docs I should have been writing years ago.

I've been doing agentic work for companies for the past year and first of all, error rates have dropped to 1-2% with the leading Q3 and Q4 models... 2026's Q1 models blowing those out the water and being cheaper in some way

but second of all, even when error rates were 20%, the time savings still meant A Viable Business. a much more viable business actually, a scarily crazy viable business with many annoyed customers getting slop of some sort, with a human in the loop correcting things from the LLM before it went out to consumers

agentic LLM coders are better than your co-workers. they can also write tests. they can do stress testing, load testing, end to end testing, and in my experience that's not even what course corrects LLMs that well, so we shouldn't even be trying to replicate processes made for humans with them. like a human, the LLM is prone to just correct the test as the test uses a deprecated assumption as opposed to product changes breaking a test to reveal a regression.

in my experience, type errors, compiler errors, logs on deployment and database entries have made the LLM correct its approach more than tests. Devops and Data science, more than QA.

Why wouldn't you test? That sounds like a bad thing.

Me? I use AI to write tests just as I use it to write everything else. I pay a lot of attention to what's being done including code quality but I am no more insecure about trusting those thousands of tested lines than I am about trusting the byte code generated from the 'strings of code'.

We have just moved up another level of abstraction, as we have done many times before. It will take time to perfect but it's already amazing.

Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked at...

In my case is nearer to ∞x. I have developed an opensource Android app which has already ~200 users that I would never ever written in my whole life. Zero experience with mobile development and zero time in my free time to focus on this appropriately to at least try to learn how to do it. I know myself, I would have given up before getting the first dummy APK on my phone. And while it's totally vibe-coded, in the sense that I just prompted CC and not written a single line of Kotlin code, I put a ton of effort on it anyway, on how I want it to behave, how it looks like, squashing all the usual subtle bugs that CC leaves here and there.

How do you even begin to define objective measurements of software engineering productivity? You could use DORA metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is delivered. Or you could use the SPACE Framework [2] which is more about the developer experience.

1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

2. https://space-framework.com/

Ha ha, for some of us the "feeling" is good enough.

IDK just yesterday I got a complete slide / powerpoint-lite editor in Qt Quick that is sufficient for the use case I have in two prompts, roughly 7 minutes. How long would it take you to write, on your best day, using your favourite programming language ?

For me the evidence is I have completed side projects I never would have before. I also recently started building a game that I had put off for years. At work I am closing more features than historically and at the end of the day not as fatigued. It’s only my experience and everyone’s is going to be different.

Don't you have anything better to do with your time?

I told you people back in 2019 that these models would replace Hollywood and you and others have been calling me all kinds of names, and every step of the way calling me an idiot. I'm a filmmaker - I know what I'm talking about. And now we're almost here. We have million dollar VFX services at our disposal for pennies.

Claude Code is doing the exact same thing for software engineering. I've been a senior software engineer for a good while - these capabilities are otherworldly and they can generalize to all new unseen problems. You're not paying attention.

I'd be more worried about whether or not you have a job in 5 years than whether I have or have not created a business or whatever criteria you want to use to thumb your nose at me.

You know how you can quickly ideate software plans for some large scale idea? Architecture, infrastructure, data models, etc., but the implementation takes longer? Claude Code short circuits that last bit. You need to hold your nose so you stop smelling whatever you're smelling and just try the damn tool.

I wish I could slap sense into you grumpy folks. You're so stiff in your beliefs. This is a train headed your way. Pay attention.

part of my adhd/bipolar is reacting like the guy you're replying to and I was thinking the same. Comment reminded me of when I'm in the "YES THIS IS IT" mode which usually isn't far off from hitting the wall. Hopefully just projection on my part, though, and this guy is really doing well. When I start talking like him though I usually have to take a step back and it'll be a topic in therapy next session.

Protip: you can install Tailscale on both phones and the Pi and then the phones can connect to the database from anywhere using the Pi's Tailscale IP.