How long were they doing it when people would just steal their content with no attribution? Or do you personally thank every stack overflow that helped you?
As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies.
AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good better. You need even more engineering disciplines than before to make sure it's the latter and not the former. Even with chaining code quality MCP's and a whole bunch of instructions in AGENTS.md, there's often a need to intervene and course adjust, because AI can either ignore AGENTS.md, or because whatever can pass code quality checks does not always mean the architecture is something that's solid.
That being said, I do agree our job is changing from merely writing code, to more of a managerial title, like you've said. But, there's a new limit - your ability to review the output, and you most definitely should review the output if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software.
but AI being solely a force multiplier is not accurate, it is a intelligence multiplier. There are significantly better ways now to apply skills and taste with less worry about technical debt. AI coding agents have gotten to the point that it virtually removes ALL effort barrierrs even paying off technical debt.
While it is still important to pay attention to the direction your code is being generated, the old fears and caution we attributed to previous iteration of AI codegen is largely being eroded and this trend will continue to the point where our "specialty" will no longer matter.
I'm already seeing small businesses that laid off their teams and the business owner is generating code themselves. The ability to defend the thinning moat of not only software but virtually all white collar jobs is getting tougher.
> if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software
If software becomes cheaper to make it amortizes at a higher rate, ie, it becomes less valuable at a faster clip. This means more ephemeral software with a shorter shelf-life. What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?
I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s and without having watched the features expand over the years I don’t think I would find the tool useful for someone without a lot of experience.
This being said, short-lived and highly targeted, less feature-full software for image creation and manipulation catered to the individual and specific to an immediate task seems advantageous.
Dynamism applied not to the code but to the products themselves.
> What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?
The quality of everything will become lower. There's no way to reliably capture thousands of business requirements and edge cases in every short-lived disposable iteration. The happy flows will probably mostly work.
We used to laugh at Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, and later China, because their knock-off products were, without exception, worse than ours. Now we're willingly doing the same to ourselves.
> What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?
One problem is that people don't like learning new software interfaces, and another is that communities help support software, but communities need stable, long-lived software to foster.
Yes, I didn't do a great job of managing my language in that post (I blame flu-brain). In the case where _someone_ is going to be reading the code I output, I do review it and act more as the pilot-not-flying rather than as a passenger. For personal code (as opposed to code for a client), which is the majority of stuff that I've written since Opus 4.5 released, that's not been the case.
I'll update the post to reflect the reality, thanks for calling it out.
I completely agree with your comment. I think the ability to review code, architecture, abstractions matters more than the actual writing of the code - in fact this has really always been the case, it's just clearer now that everyone has a lackey to do the typing for them.
I for one don't remember software ever being very good. Windows XP crashed all the time and needed frequent formats due to all the viruses (all antivirus software) that made it unusable. Win 2k was even worse. Old MacOS's also crashed frequently. Old Linux's had barely any hardware support. In fact while I agree that software is more bloated than ever, it also seems more stable than ever thinking back to what was before.
I have a Framework 16, and as for it being a Linux machine I couldn't be happier with it. I still daily drive my MacBook Pro 16 instead, because it's just a more polished, more performant (and better battery life) machine, but still, I also really like my Framework 16. I eagerly await the time when Linux desktops reach the level of polish I'd like to have, and I feel like that isn't that far away anymore.
People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.
I’ve typed comments here on this site in Emacs using a Firefox extension. And often I do it manually since I don’t want to lose three paragraphs to the whims of the browser state.
Not that it matters since I type such characters with my keybored directly. There are dozens of us.
Maybe they are using a Mac (where you type alt-hyphen for a emdash)? Or run Windows and have a numeric keypad (ctrl-minus)? Or they run a browser extension like Grammarly that auto-substitutes?
I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.
Discovered in-door bouldering / rock climbing and now go 3x a week, am absolutely loving it! Because of that, I haven't really worked on any side projects in a while. Perhaps I don't need to? My job advances me plenty in my field, but it is a bit of a bitter-sweet feeling in a sense, like maybe I should try to squeeze more out of my free time somehow.
I climb a lot! (Actually currently sitting on Big Sur ledge on el cap posting this).
It cuts into my free time programming for sure, but imo super worth it! Enjoy it, it’s a wonderful hobby.
I’m replying from the cold east coast (from the edge of a wood chair in a lovely iykyk type of restaurant) to a human posting from el cap on hn; We have achieved peak technology. Oh yeah, I’m working on urban logistics, powered by AI.
I’ve been hesitant for fear of injury harming the ability to type, but might give it a go in the spring. Thanks for mentioning this I’m inspired to try it finally.
I struggled with hand and wrist pain for years from spending too much time at a computer. I did physiotherapy for years and while it helped me manage pain, I was never able to truly build enough strength to get ahead of it until I started bouldering. I took it very slowly—I spent months on very easy problems—but because it was so much fun, I kept going back. Initially, I would only go on Saturday mornings, so I had the full weekend to recover before jumping back into the work week on Monday. After a two or three months of that, I was able to climb anytime I wished. I'm still not a particularly advanced climber, and I typically only go once per week, but I am still slowly progressing, and I absolutely love it.
Couple things to avoid finger injuries: go easy on one- and two-finger pockets, use an open crimp whenever possible (all finger joints are bent the normal direction, and your palm/thumb aren't really involved), and don't bother with the hangboard or campus board for the first ~year.
I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.
Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)
I'd like to add to this that do not make any food with chilli peppers like habanero or such if you just came from the gym with torn skin. I found out the hard way.
I’ve been climbing for 20 years and it’s the thing that prevents RSI for me and makes it possible to use a computer too much :). Certainly possible to injure fingers but would be a very rare climbing injury that would threaten coding.
Climbing easy routes in a gym is pretty low impact. It’s only when you start to move into really hard crimps or slopers where you’ll hurt yourself. I was a climber bum for years and have climbed crazy stuff around the world and never hurt myself to where I couldn’t type. A lot of bloody tape, but still able to type.
Try top rope climbing! Bouldering is injury prone because every fall is a ground fall. With top rope climbing you should never hit the ground so way less injury prone.
I love the intense concentration for martial arts, but I had to stop because of this.
I never had a serious injury. Instead it would be minor injuries, that would make my ring finger 20% less responsive, that would totally mess up my typing cadence.
I tried capoeira, a non-contact martial art, for a while. This wasn’t as good for me as Taekwondo.
Well Gnome tells people that they should just know keyboard shortcuts for everything - which is literally something only power users know to do. Their entire design ethos is a weird opposition to itself where it is aiming to be so simple and minimal that in order to do basic things you have to memorize keyboard shortcuts as there is no visual interface possibility to do those things.
Where do they tell to use keyboard shortcuts? I've been using Gnome 3 since it came out and I haven't encountered situations where I could do things with keyboard I couldn't do easily with mouse.
I'm assuming you have a rather small resolution display? On a 27" 4k display, scaled to 150%, the font is quite tiny, to the point where the textarea I currently type this in (which uses the browsers default font size) is about 3 times the perceivable size in comparison to the HN comments themselves.
Yup, and these days we have relative units in CSS such that we no longer need to hardcode pixels, so everyone wins (em, rem). That way people can get usability according to the browsers defaults, which make the whole thing user configurable.
OTOH, people with 30+ inch screens probably sit a bit further away to be able to see everything without moving their head so it makes sense that even sites which take DPI into account use larger fonts because it's not really about how large something is physically on the screen but about the angular size relative to the eye.
Yeah, one of the other cousin comments mentions 36 inches away. I don't think they realize just how far outliers they are. Of course you have to make everything huge when your screen is so much further away than normal.
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