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danmcr 22 minutes ago [-]
I have a friend who works at a large F100 and in his 12 years as a dev, he has never dreaded his job as he does now.
He's working 10 hrs. a day, just entering things into Claude, waiting, reviewing, and learning absolutely nothing.
At this point anyone who was truly passionate about programming, is just less and less motivated to become a better engineer.
grey-area 17 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't have to be this way. LLMs can be quite helpful in analysis and small coding tasks. I understand everyone doesn't control their environment, but surely there are some sane places out there?
We don't have try to use them as 'agents' to write and understand all the code for us, frankly I wouldn't trust them to do so, they make too many mistakes and foolish decisions about architecture.
bdangubic 14 minutes ago [-]
those places are vanishing fast and are extremely difficult to find these days (and that will only get worse)
mixmastamyk 15 minutes ago [-]
Why work ten hours a day if the computer is doing the work?
Refreeze5224 12 minutes ago [-]
Now you know how everyone felt when horses were replaced by cars. Technology has not shortened anyone's work day. Only radical labor has.
kylecazar 4 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how many people spend less time working but don't spend less time at work, though. I'm sure it depends on the role/company, but there must be some cohort it's enabled to slack harder. Probably not engineers.
marginalia_nu 44 minutes ago [-]
If models are getting exponentially cheaper and more powerful, going all in a year ago is kind of insane. There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow (assuming models get cheaper and better). There's really a weird sort of late mover's advantage to just holding off and saving your money unless you expect your profit to grow faster than AI becomes more powerful.
NoPicklez 34 minutes ago [-]
You could make this claim right now as well, may as well wait now until the models are cheaper and better later.
You could say in a years time that going in now was kind of insane.
marginalia_nu 28 minutes ago [-]
The sane move in such an environment is to wait and let other people leeroy jenkins in and make mistakes, learn from their blunders, and only move once clear best practices are in place.
embedding-shape 25 minutes ago [-]
I dunno, personally I learn best by fucking up myself, even observing others fucking up from afar seems to not nearly have the same impact and knowledge-gaining. I always make sure to learn in low-stakes environments though, not like Facebook's "Move fast, break democracies" approach.
marginalia_nu 23 minutes ago [-]
Well you can still fiddle on projects if you feel like it. But like maybe don't bet the entire business on a venture to figure out best practices for AI coding.
_kulang 39 minutes ago [-]
Growth and change is so fast that waiting is almost a virtue. Why spend effort getting opus 4.8 to work on my codebase when opus 5.5 will arrive within 8 months anyway? Why spend effort getting opus 5.5 to do anything when opus 6 will arrive in the near future?
The only things that I do with AI at my job are easy things. AI hasn’t transformed hard work in quite the same way, but it has given me access to knowledge and information about things and processes that I didn’t have before. It also forces me to write things down, which is perhaps a not insignificant amount of the improvement in our business
throw0101d 22 minutes ago [-]
> There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow
"reverse token value inflation"?
Do you perhaps mean "deflation"?
amw-zero 27 minutes ago [-]
But then you won't know how to efficiently use AI, so you'll still end up spending more money when you start using it, nullifying any of the micro-optimization you were trying to do in the first place.
gonzalohm 20 minutes ago [-]
Aren't AI companies aiming at a level of AI that would basically be "do this app" and will take care of everything?
If not, what are they even doing that they keep burning through piles of cash?
rogerrogerr 25 minutes ago [-]
I wish "how to efficiently use AI" was a deep subject; it isn't. You point it at problems and they get solved. It's mega boring, and the main reason I'm looking to leave the industry.
netrem 18 minutes ago [-]
Overengineering it can also harm performance. When a new model comes out with a different system prompt, custom instructions can become a hindrance.
marginalia_nu 24 minutes ago [-]
Why do you have to personally invent how to effectively use AI? You can learn from other people's mistakes, wait for best practices to settle. Be Java.
Jare 18 minutes ago [-]
> Be Java.
Ok if this is the advice then I'm gonna look for a second opinion first. :)
More seriously: making any crap with AI is trivial and doesn't need learning. Making something better and more valuable than all the competitors *that have the same tools as you* is more involved, and relies 100% on knowing how to extract unique value from the tools. A part of that comes from your product/industry expertise (acquired before AI, much like your competitors), but unless you're a genius or in a greenfield, what will matter will be the other part where you have trained hard to be a better driver than your competition who just waited and watched a few youtubes.
georgemcbay 14 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't be surprised if a "year ago" is a rough estimate.
I recall mid-to-late November 2025 being a big inflection point where it finally became obvious that these things could actually be trusted to do a decent amount (but not all) of the coding. So maybe it was more like 8 months ago or whatever that they went all-in, close enough to a year for a random reddit rant.
The overall gist of what the person posted matches my experience though. The fall-off on understanding the code to any meaningful degree happens very quick once you give full rein to the LLM and lean into mostly-automated reviewing.
ares623 31 minutes ago [-]
So what you're really saying is to... hodl your tokens?
AnimalMuppet 24 minutes ago [-]
It depends on how you read the market - not the AI market, but the one your code is addressing. If it's a growth market with some lock-in, being first matters a fair amount. If you didn't have the people to hand-code it, then you want to code it as soon as you have the (people + money for tokens) that will get it done.
But if that isn't your competitive landscape...
netrem 4 minutes ago [-]
One counter argument to this is that realistically nobody 'understood' the codebase even before AI.
A couple months after not touching code it was always a mystery. You'd know the high level architecture but you can still know that even while using AI.
proc0 43 minutes ago [-]
Yeah this is what happens when you think code is the product. It's really the understanding and also the design of the software that is the "engine" of value, and the problem is that it's hard to justify spending money to build something that is intangible and might be visible in the future.
When non-technical people call the shots, they will rarely bet on spending time and effort on designing things properly because they can't see the value and it's hard to communicate and convince others of its business value.
austin-cheney 35 minutes ago [-]
Also think about it in terms of start up value. The value of your business is a combination of employee expertise and customer/client relationships. Everything else can be reverse engineered. If all you have is a product written by AI then who cares?
marginalia_nu 42 minutes ago [-]
If only we'd tried shipping all the understanding to coding sweatshops in India with identical disastrous results 20 years ago, maybe we would have learned from that.
rabidheuristics 30 minutes ago [-]
I see what you did there.
bdangubic 11 minutes ago [-]
on the flip side of this witty comment, (very very very) few of these that went to Bangalore etc ever returned home…
cadamsdotcom 7 minutes ago [-]
Someone is rife for disruption.
NoPicklez 32 minutes ago [-]
> Except half of us haven't written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024.
This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
threethirtytwo 12 minutes ago [-]
What benefit is there for the individual to have cognition when we reach out to AI to do all of this for us?
bdangubic 27 minutes ago [-]
benefiting the company is the whole point, they cut the checks, yes? why would any company give a hoot about yours or mine cognitive ability to learn or your knowledge/skills? if they deteriorate to the point you can’t be productive any longer they will replace you
10111001 28 minutes ago [-]
> This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
Your well-being and self-improvement is not a priority for your capitalist employer, especially given ideological changes over the past 70 or so years. They would just as rather use you up, throw you away, and replace you with something else, if that was more convenient for them.
Isn't it wonderful to be on your own? Remember that next time someone talks about starting a union.
add-sub-mul-div 18 minutes ago [-]
Engineers adopting this so quickly always looked like useful idiot behavior to me.
voidfunc 40 minutes ago [-]
Just do what management wants and take the bag of money. That's all everyone is doing up the chain anyways.
happytoexplain 26 minutes ago [-]
Even disregarding the direct arguments that can be made against normalizing this attitude, there isn't a bag of money for most developers. HN is biased to think of the typical smart, hard-working software developer as making enough for a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, but that hasn't been the case even since before the LLMs of the past couple years. Businesses are offloading more and more and more of the effects of inflation onto employees, rather than sharing the burden. A handful of factors are being used as excuses to accelerate this trend, and AI is one of them.
tayo42 39 minutes ago [-]
Pangram said the op post is 100% AI generated.
It does seem to have ai pacing and ends with a question.
> The part that actually hurts is who is left.
That line actually made me suspicious. Op doesn't respond, also has a hidden profile.
This stuff is all over reddit now.
greggoB 25 minutes ago [-]
> and ends with a question.
It's a reddit post - it ending by asking if others have had a shared experience hardly seems out of the ordinary.
tayo42 20 minutes ago [-]
It could have started with the question. The question could have been in the middle. It could have ended with a sentence after the question. But it's one aspect of the whole post that shows it's some weird engagement bot post.
This thread is discussing something that's not real. People are forming opinions and discussing it. Unless everyone's a bot?
greggoB 15 minutes ago [-]
I really don't get that from reading it several times over now. Maybe the paragraph starting with "The part that actually hurts is who is left...", but even that's a stretch for me.
> The question could have been in the middle
Tbh I would have found this much weirder.
tayo42 10 minutes ago [-]
Maybe not literally middle
> Not sure what I want from posting this.
> Is anyone else at the point where the mandate is being walked back, and how did you get the understanding back?
These two sentences could have been reversed and it would have been fine.
The post could have ended without the question and would have been fine.
I'm pretty sure I'm right that this is a fake post. Are you disagreeing that this is fake or ai written? Or with how I came to that conclusion? It's not the only tell, but one of a few.
tasuki 18 minutes ago [-]
> Pangram said
I wish people stopped posting what Pangram said. Pangram set an impossible task before them — either they're grifters or naive. They use a magic box to determine whether someone else used a magic box, giving you a bullshit result.
tayo42 15 minutes ago [-]
You can take a bunch of clues and decide if its a post worth engaging with. It did say 100%, and there's other clues that make it seem like bot spam.
dadnet 26 minutes ago [-]
The dead internet theory was a joke until it wasnt. I find it genuinely unsettling.
fomoz 17 minutes ago [-]
It's def written by AI but that doesn't mean that he's a bot. Just a coward. LOL!
add-sub-mul-div 21 minutes ago [-]
It's not surprising someone like that has stopped using their brain for writing English as well.
tayo42 18 minutes ago [-]
You think there's a real person behind this still? That seems like really weird behavior.
alex_mantello 1 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Refreeze5224 13 minutes ago [-]
This is the very obvious logical conclusion of AI and programming. The bean counters don't care if you understand anything, or if your skills atrophy. Unless and until the cost of no one understanding the code outweighs having to pay those pesky humans and all their wants and needs, this will continue to be the norm.
ToyKeeper 28 minutes ago [-]
Posted in a subreddit for vibe coding enthusiasts.
Top-rated reply tells submitter to solve their AI problem by adding more AI.
Magnificent.
dilap 29 minutes ago [-]
I guess mgmt also mandated they use AI to write their reddit posts?
pessimizer 28 minutes ago [-]
What do you do when your entirely AI written codebase runs like shit? Do you prompt it to "do better"?
"Find the things that you did that are badly, and do them better. Add a directive to claude.md to do it right the first time, next time."
If AI codes better than humans, I don't understand why it has a dozen copies of stuff everywhere. Even people who suck don't suck that much. I don't even understand how you can get away with it unless you're writing functional code.
He's working 10 hrs. a day, just entering things into Claude, waiting, reviewing, and learning absolutely nothing.
At this point anyone who was truly passionate about programming, is just less and less motivated to become a better engineer.
We don't have try to use them as 'agents' to write and understand all the code for us, frankly I wouldn't trust them to do so, they make too many mistakes and foolish decisions about architecture.
You could say in a years time that going in now was kind of insane.
The only things that I do with AI at my job are easy things. AI hasn’t transformed hard work in quite the same way, but it has given me access to knowledge and information about things and processes that I didn’t have before. It also forces me to write things down, which is perhaps a not insignificant amount of the improvement in our business
"reverse token value inflation"?
Do you perhaps mean "deflation"?
If not, what are they even doing that they keep burning through piles of cash?
Ok if this is the advice then I'm gonna look for a second opinion first. :)
More seriously: making any crap with AI is trivial and doesn't need learning. Making something better and more valuable than all the competitors *that have the same tools as you* is more involved, and relies 100% on knowing how to extract unique value from the tools. A part of that comes from your product/industry expertise (acquired before AI, much like your competitors), but unless you're a genius or in a greenfield, what will matter will be the other part where you have trained hard to be a better driver than your competition who just waited and watched a few youtubes.
I recall mid-to-late November 2025 being a big inflection point where it finally became obvious that these things could actually be trusted to do a decent amount (but not all) of the coding. So maybe it was more like 8 months ago or whatever that they went all-in, close enough to a year for a random reddit rant.
The overall gist of what the person posted matches my experience though. The fall-off on understanding the code to any meaningful degree happens very quick once you give full rein to the LLM and lean into mostly-automated reviewing.
But if that isn't your competitive landscape...
A couple months after not touching code it was always a mystery. You'd know the high level architecture but you can still know that even while using AI.
When non-technical people call the shots, they will rarely bet on spending time and effort on designing things properly because they can't see the value and it's hard to communicate and convince others of its business value.
This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
Your well-being and self-improvement is not a priority for your capitalist employer, especially given ideological changes over the past 70 or so years. They would just as rather use you up, throw you away, and replace you with something else, if that was more convenient for them.
Isn't it wonderful to be on your own? Remember that next time someone talks about starting a union.
It does seem to have ai pacing and ends with a question.
> The part that actually hurts is who is left.
That line actually made me suspicious. Op doesn't respond, also has a hidden profile.
This stuff is all over reddit now.
It's a reddit post - it ending by asking if others have had a shared experience hardly seems out of the ordinary.
This thread is discussing something that's not real. People are forming opinions and discussing it. Unless everyone's a bot?
> The question could have been in the middle
Tbh I would have found this much weirder.
> Not sure what I want from posting this.
> Is anyone else at the point where the mandate is being walked back, and how did you get the understanding back?
These two sentences could have been reversed and it would have been fine.
The post could have ended without the question and would have been fine.
I'm pretty sure I'm right that this is a fake post. Are you disagreeing that this is fake or ai written? Or with how I came to that conclusion? It's not the only tell, but one of a few.
I wish people stopped posting what Pangram said. Pangram set an impossible task before them — either they're grifters or naive. They use a magic box to determine whether someone else used a magic box, giving you a bullshit result.
Top-rated reply tells submitter to solve their AI problem by adding more AI.
Magnificent.
"Find the things that you did that are badly, and do them better. Add a directive to claude.md to do it right the first time, next time."
If AI codes better than humans, I don't understand why it has a dozen copies of stuff everywhere. Even people who suck don't suck that much. I don't even understand how you can get away with it unless you're writing functional code.