Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

What most miss today is DX - Developer Experience, many (most?) devs don't want to become Prompt Engineers.

Another thing is that not many can afford Fable or similar and I don't think prices will go down, since it is already heavily subsidized?

I worked with mid level devs that would write 5 lines of code (literally) and run it through an llm for validation, so yeah they were spending tokens like crazy. They end up being more expensive to the company with no added benefit

I wonder if people writing these comments actually do this hands on.

That's because I do and a one line fix rarely costs anything but cents. Unless you first need to let it figure out which line it is, but that's not a fair comparison because you'd also first need to find out. And if it takes you an hour then instead paying $10 could be a reasonable price to pay.

On the other hand, sometimes the hardest bugs are only a few lines of code and days of debugging. If an LLM can do it in a day, you've saved time.

But it took you probably years of knowledge and learning to be able to fix the line. If you start learning that from 0 today, the AI will be cheaper in the long run - because while it cost 10$ today, we know from history that everything computers & electronics gets faster and more efficient, so it will be 1$ or less in a couple of years.

Did AI take it away, or did you give it away?

Now that you've made the Faustian bargain at this low low introductory price, how long until they start ratcheting up the price? How long will you be able to bear it?

You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Given the rapid skill degradation that results from LLM-driven coding usage, I'd recommend it if you want to retain any skill at all.

Same here. FWIW, you can still absolutely do it, just like you can weave your own fabric. You probably won't be able to monetize it though, as it won't give you as much edge in the workspace anymore. It's just a thing to do in your spare time.

Not sure if it helps with the feeling of futility or not. For me, it doesn't really help that much because ultimately I want the skills and knowledge I gathered to benefit me in some way. For example, previously I would be able to better understand computers and software, be an "overall better" programmer, better thinker (in terms of computation). If the results you get are not used in any way, it's on the same level as memorizing rule sets for some obscure game that no one knows or cares about.

Maybe pivoting to something else like philosophy could make sense as a hobby.

Of course, there's always going to be some demand for knowing computers, knowing programming languages first-hand, etc. Writing or auditing code for critical systems. Teaching the next generations of people that will do critical systems. Some people are optimistic in that they are going to fall into that demand. I'm not optimistic about myself.

It's not true at all. I recently vibe coded a REST API in Golang even though I never wrote any production Go code. However, I had to make copious use of my previous experience as an engineer to achieve quality.

You can see this in the real world. The people who are getting the most out of AI are the ones who already have experience coding without AI.

CEOs don't want to admit it but AI can't code anything non-trivial on its own.

I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it.

Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy.

I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I’ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and health, and now I’m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want while repurposing an old Android device as the server.

Do I miss nerding out over implementing a B-tree, or learning async programming in F#, Go, Crystal, Nim, C++, C#, JavaScript workers, or Java green threads?

I don’t know, man. Maybe a little.

But it has also never been easier to say: “Hey AI, teach me this concept using five examples. Give me one task, then evaluate my solution. And teach it in this particular style.”

We lost something. I genuinely think we did.

But I also think we gained much more.

It’s okay to mourn what was lost, as long as you can still look forward.

> learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms

Let's be honest here: how many actually distinct paradigms are we really talking about here? I challenge you to name more than 5 which are not just flavors of the same core approach. Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software.

I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit

I really do differentiate between fast & vast changes of commodity code and critical sections. For the latter I’d explore with AI and then rewrite, line by line, with deliberate concern for all aspects relevant.

This does retain the joy of coding for me and takes away the pain of what is commodity and hard to do without tiresome meetings (mostly UI/UX and API/MCP as my products don’t differentiate on these).

I just spent the past three hours debugging a long latent bug from vibe coding a thing. The only way I found it was running a debugger through the C++ code and tracing everything -- Claude was utterly useless until I basically pointed out the problem to it. I don't think understanding technical aspects of programming is a waste of time at all, it's still very necessary. The annoying thing too is that, whatever time I saved having the LLM write it, I pretty much just lost having to debug it. (For what it's worth: the bug it introduced is one I never would have introduced on my own, because it fundamentally misunderstood a key component of the design)

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all.

I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few days. It wouldn't even matter if I got it done faster since the bottleneck is decisions in the next meeting or waiting to hear back from another team. Dev time was always trivial and irrelevant. Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal.

What else are you doing with your time? How much discussion does your team even have if the nuances of the code aren't important to you?

same camp

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts

perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone. we can finally be in a room and just talk about good engineering. the people we as engineers never wanted to hear from are off attempting to force the world to use a tool that everyone 40 and under passionately rejects (this is spicy for HN terms, but the avg joe hates AI. people aren't stupid - they know they only stand to lose from it in the longer term).

perspective shift 2: I just read Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It taught me a lot. I came away from that book understanding what "quality" means at a very philosophical level, and it gave me a lot of confidence for some fuzzy thoughts I already felt. it's too abstract to explain here, but it does a good job of explaining that there is perceived and strong difference between caring something into existence, verses just generating something into existence. this book breaks down how quality is not some artifact that lives in what you're making, and or is some feeling you get when you look at something that is aesthetically pleasing - quality is an event that occurs before you mind has differentiated yourself from the thing subject/object you're admiring - and in that moment, quality arises from the care you give it. there must exists energy and care towards what you're doing for quality to arise. generating anything with AI will never bring that fruition.

many people try to counter this stance by saying that they iterate with AI forever, and assume that iteration is a the same as the caring event described in ZATAOMM - but the difference is that grading output is not the same as creating/authorship. it's must a read and deep study I think if you're into programming and this mental state

perspective shift 3: This talk from Brandon Sanderson called We are the Art [1]. I personally do a lot of creative coding - like games and such. this talk does a great job of breaking down how art and creation ultimately lives in the person. I won't summarize here, just a must a watch

perspective shift 4: I got off all the mainstream social media site bc the PR machine for AI is relentless. of course you're going to feel like crap when every site says, future generations will be homeless, K shaped economy, permanent underclass, etc. you gotta log off these sites to create some distance with the beast - it's not you, the world really is just messed up rn. Also I barely browse HN anymore. this place is the public square for VCs and people who lost hte plot with technology - I just happened to be here, and wanted to help my fellow programmer grinding through the same mental trenches I was in

perspective shift 5: go find some programming communities on discord. I'm in a discord with like 5000 active members that really care about coding, and doing so without AI. this is a very active discord. once you realize there is a strong community still building like this, it really showed me we're not low in numbers, and there still a large group of people that will celebrate engineering efforts done by hand. and there are still people that need to understand these machines at a very deep level - you're efforts aren't wasted

perspective shift 6: look at AI on the job as a way to get your work done faster to get home to do real programming. work code can be trash, home is where the real work is done. The analogy I’ve been telling myself is that it’s like going into a gold mine - no one wants to be in the mine, but i do like leaving with gold. i gotta pay the bills, but i don’t need to love it.

perspective shift 7: The overall environment we live is just depressing and is reminiscent to Fahrenheit 451. I came away feeling closer to the author and protagonist than my first read. specifically the kind of hubris/ignorance found in all the side characters of F451 mimics what it feels like to talk with ai optimists. also, the way F451 is a world filled with people that are actively disengaged and comfortable being passively entertained feels almost too real. this book draws a lot of parallels with modern times, and it's a nice book to remind you that other people have felt this way in times of large technological change - and you're not crazy to feel depressed.

Go start working on that side project you use to be really passionate about. me and all the other serious engineers are excited to see it

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo

It’s okay to recognise when you’ve had enough. If your workday involves programming, ours pretty normal (for me at least) to not want to do more programming at home. You gotta let yourself miss it a bit if you want to want it.

On Wayback machine references to this post (a much shorter version though) go back to 1998, this is the oldest reference:

https://web.archive.org/web/19980206223800/https://www.norvi...

I see a reference to Khan Academy, but not Go?

I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you?

The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less).

This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.

Claude isn’t even good enough for Anthropic to release native desktop applications for each OS. As someone said in a comment in a different post here, it seems like these tools are good at web and web related (like Electron) development.

Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications.

OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.

Two things:

1) By the time I’ve determined, and expressed to my satisfaction, exactly what I want, I’ve already done the hard work of coding that thing. The rest is fairly mechanical by comparison.

2) It’s a universal truth (which I know someone’s gonna argue with :D ) that reading and working with other peoples’ code is much less fun than reading and working with your own. This applies even if the other people are robots.

3) When checking and troubleshooting code, the bulk of the time is spent understanding it in the first place. If you wrote the code yourself this already implicitly happened and is ‘free’.

Put those four[1] things together and at least for me personally, AI-assisted coding isn’t a better experience than just doing it myself. It’s still great for bootstrapping yourself into a new unfamiliar language/environment though.

[1] Yeah it’s an off-by-one joke. ;)

The utility of this stuff is largely going away. It’s more just hobbyists now or old timers like me who actually “learned” programming.

There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.

Was this known in 1998?

I have used AI almost exclusively for a year, but I was programming by hand for almost 30 years before that. I don't think there is any difference between going from assembly -> C -> Java, TypeScript, C#, Go, etc, and taking the next step to AI. It is just another intermediate abstraction layer that allows you to work at larger scale.

Programming with AI enforces some good disciplines, which were always true, but could be avoided doing it by hand. Most importantly: you are shipping your tests. If you don't have reproducible automated tests then it probably doesn't work.

It’s been almost long enough to teach yourself programming three times!

Maybe an yearly ritual?