It used to be hard

If you're not finding it hard to write software any more, write more ambitious software.

I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that.

Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.

What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with duct tape and a prayer. Although this guy doesn't have any traditional background but still, if LLM generated coding agents were so good even a simpleton like himself should be able to create a miraculous piece of software, right?

I remember C compilers becoming affordable, and GCC actually getting good.

I remember Java coming along, and how much easier it was to build compared to all the crazy linking and cryptic error messages my C compiler gave me once you went beyond a toy program. And god forbid you wanted it to run on BOTH Borland and visual C!

I remember CGI, and then PHP making it trivial to write web apps, and then less trivial webapps, and then webapps that people actually used in serious business.

Then I watched the same thing happen with Javascript.

All those rebuilds of the same foundations, making the same fundamental design mistakes again and again like a wheel of karma, but with prettier UX and less vendor lock-in.

And now, AI makes it even easier to re-make those mistakes. It's gotten "easier", but it's actually gotten harder. Making something that runs has never been more trivial. Making something with a solid architecture and disciplined hygiene has never been harder.

And so we begin round 4 of re-learning the lessons of the 1960s-1970s.

TBQH it used to be easy. I remember watching one person with Access set up dashboards that worked 1000x better than all of the dozen SAAS tools no one can wrangle together today. Small businesses pushed updates and menus from Frontpage. We used to spin up quick code on our calculators, meanwhile our much more powerful phones act like executing our own code is an act of terrorism.

LLMs (maybe) get us a little closer to closing the complexity gap and making our personal computers personal again, but with the funny problem of needing to use someone else's computer to do so.

Maybe it’s just me but it’s still hard. Writing code wasn’t hard before. Honestly putting up guard rails is harder than writing it yourself. It just may be faster now.

Getting proper requirements, knowing what to make, update, the domain knowledge, satisfying customers was and still is the hard part.

> Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop? It used to be hard

Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.

I disagree that something becoming easier is a negative, even if it sucks for the people who learned the hard way.

The real issue is that the floor has been lowered, but the ceiling stays as high. It's always been a problem in this profession, where you can get something running much easier than you can make something safe, maintainable and ethical.

We keep making it easier and easier to disregard those extras. Both technically and culturally. It's not a good path.

Hard is relative. The Apple IIe could do roughly a half-million instructions per second. Yet, application develop was long and tedious. Layers upon layers of abstraction requires more powerful CPUs, but translated into highly complex applications and user interfaces. What if we could use the LLM tools we have now to go back and see what is possible with older machines?

For example: The Python print('A') statement translates into thousands of lines of assembly (using mostly compiled libraries). The actual minimum assembly to generate a print statement is less than a hundred. Claude code can do this:

>>Generate the minimum amount of assembly code to obtain the same result as print('A') in Python.

The result is 43-bytes of machine code (it works, unsurprisingly). Claude estimates that Python requires 5 megabytes of compiled libraries to get print('A') to work.

> This might be why despite AI automating so much work, the 996 grind culture is more alive than ever.

There's an interesting paradox which occurs when a particular field finds its work becoming easier. Suddenly, the world needs more of everyone else's job and less of your job. You have to work harder now that there's less work to do, because there's more competition.

It's maybe much easier to create code, but it's still hard to create good software, and for the next few years we have a monumental challenge of figuring out how does one create good software when cost of code is approaching zero. It will be harder to decide what to build (or what to not build), increase the velocity, even if only for infosec patching, make use of increased velocity for features, massively increase experimenting capacity, and close the biggest loop. Even the best teams now are barely scratching the surface of what tomorrow brings, and it's super exciting, interesting and definitely not easy. It will be hard, but not in the part that was hard before.

I think emotions are an underrated aspect to the "AI changes how we work" thing. Everyone I know extensively uses AI in most parts of their work. Basically everyone has multiplied their output by a lot.

But I don't know many people who say they enjoy their work more because of AI. I definitely resonate with the pain of watching something that required so many little bits of knowledge you earned over years melt into pushing a button.

I might just be the artisan cobbler watching factories rise during the industrial revolution. Making good boots was and is still hard and requires a lot of specific knowledge, but the amount of people appreciating well-made boots plummeted as factor-made, cheaper boots flooded the market.

And I know, rationally, that the line of "what is hard" is just moving. There are great industrially-made goods the same way there are great products whose code is mainly AI-generated. Like good boots, building safe, scalable, distributed systems is still hard.

But I can't help but have some nostalgia for how things were pre-AI. Work felt more honest, the skills I spent years building felt more valuable, and I was more satisfied at work.

I read this blog post and the authors other blog posts. They give off a strange vibe to me.

It's almost like a reverse doomer-doomer-ism. I'm terribly sad because others don't see the value in this thing I grew to value. It is very New York hipster.

I think it mostly got harder? You had relatively clearly defined paths to build a skill that would be valuable. And now you don't. So the skill that you need to learn now is, roughly, figuring out what to do when nobody tells you what to do.

I disagree with the article a lot. Solving problems because easier yes, the size of the problems became bigger. What I can do now with an LLM is magnitudes larger than I could've done alone.

I think the hard problems are still hard.

I think the problems used to be easy and here we are.

Its still really hard to build large, secure and maintainable systems.

idk how many articles I have seen as variants of this but

what you do when things get easier is... go try something more difficult

If before it was hard to build one software thing

And now it's easy but building 10 software things is hard (or some other kind of new software thing)

Then you build the 10 or new hard software thing

Satisfaction restored?

What will always be hard and useful is to observe people, find a problem they haven't solved, and then solve that problem for them. AI has not, and will not, make that easier or less useful.

All these analogies are just bad. If we are going to live with LLMs, let's reason from first principles. 'It feels like we're just going to be left with analogies'.

> I legitimately think this will be the biggest sociopolitical issue over the next few years. The frustration of seeing your hard work getting one-shotted.

Man, what a narrow world view.

> I feel like an old rock and roll guitarist watching a DJ sell out a stadium.

Now it is too easy. I started garage band with my flatmate, we sell out stadium every weekend. Single ticktock short gets us million views.

Why people complain today? Just live celebrity life!

Very limited thinking about challenges that are derivative to this time in history.

These used to be hard things that the author listed, and a potential next evolution from 1 minute of abstract thinking on my own:

1. "Building a financial model to compare recent S-1 filings?" - Build a bigger model to do a larger and hopefully more accurate/conclusive model.

2. "Photoshopping recent presidents onto Mount Rushmore?" - Make a physical model of recent presidents on mt Rushmore.

3. "Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop?" - Make a song that people actually give a shit about.

Like cmon folks, none of these seemingly hard things were actually all that useful for humanity, but rather just a task that was put in front of us because of the environment we were/are in.

Pre and post ai-boom; most software I interact with is dog shit. Not much has changed there other than speed.

Wtf, it's still hard (wo)man, or are you just dropping your vibe coded stuff onto your customers and call it a day?

I for one still understand what I'm making and strive to be able to converse about it intelligently with anyone interested.

Of course I also use LLMs all day, but it's not like anyone can suddenly do my job to the same standards.

This is simplistic. The hard part of writing professional software has never been the code.

All the remaining problems still exists and I dare to say they were made worse.

I have bad news about the demand for DJs.

The written word went from the domain of elites to the common man in a short space of time after the printing press was invented. Today, the barrier of entry for authoring is so low, that people are self-publishing.

I'm seeing the same thing in software. The people who used to ask you to add functionality X, are now giving it a tentative go. It's not perfect, but the progress I've seen in just the last year makes me believe it will get to "good enough" to run a business on.

I think there should be honesty about what "Doing" some of these things means. Outsourcing is "doing" IFF you regard the end product as the sole meaningful or significant part of a given goal or process.

"Have your digital slave do it for you" is not really doing it if doing something and difficulty refers to your own action, and there's a gradient between that extreme and manually grinding rocks to make silicone wafers. I did not just refactor a bit of code, something did it for me. I cannot take ownership for something I didn't actually sodding do, no amount of semantic dishonesty changes this.

Ultimately I am not going to listen to someone who has """""done""""'" a hiphop cover of their history test if they put it into some software that automated 80+% of it from lyric to beat, and their decision-making amounts to 'fuck it that will do'. I'll absolutely listen to someone who has given it a real crack through means convenient and not, if it seems like they give a crap.

One of the fundamentally and widely accepted concept in learning science is the need for “desirable difficulties”. Too bad that wiping that out in favor of convenience has been the fundamental business model of Silicon Valley since two decades. LLMS productization is just the last and more egregious step in the wrong dorection.

> feel like an old rock and roll guitarist watching a DJ sell out a stadium.

> Is it bad that the barrier to entry for a DJ is lower? No

Lets set very modest goals, not selling out stadiums, just making median income, so you can buy a house and raise family.

It is much much much harder now! DJ is not even paid profession anymore! Actually maiking money is impossible. This field is impossible!

> we are not enough as people and worthy of good things.

That is totally true for like 90% of population. Not some sort of feelings, but based on response stats from job sites!