Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
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ssph about 2 hours ago 68 comments
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I can close an eye on using LLMs for research only.
These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all. I’d honestly switch careers rather than manage agents. But I’m currently out of work (contract ended) and wondering if there is still a sane place to work, or is it truly time to pivot to another career.
Discussion (68 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
If it’s not useful now you have authority on why. And if it’s not is useful then you are better at your job.
Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed. That's the deal.
>by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work
Your employer doesn't actually care about this. They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them. Obviously that's hard to accurately measure, but it's not hard for an employer to recognize that an employee being unwilling to do what they're being directed to do is probably not the best bet for someone to keep around.
A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up for unfair evaluations, etc. But you just straight up told the people paying you that you won't do what they're paying you to do lol. DEFINITELY make sure you work on your spin on this for future interviews, because knowing you were confidentially disobeying direct instructions is an immediate "pass" for me and anyone with any sense who may be interviewing you.
>This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
If you think LLMs are a fad that will just go away if you wait long enough, then you need to just remove yourself from this industry. They're not going away, for better or worse, and this kind of work is fundamentally changing. To be direct: you ARE wrong in taking this absolutist stance. It's profoundly naive to have done what you've done, and I hope, for your own sake, that you plan for your future accordingly.
If you have some moral issue with LLMs, then you probably need to just plan on pivoting your career. But if you're just stuck on some weird sense of pride for your "craft," then you need to take a step back and really try to appreciate what the reality of your career means to the people willing to pay you for work.
For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy a form of office politics. Some of those things become performance metrics, or evaluations of your "attitude."
"Performance" can mean "the quality of your work." It also can mean "theater." Like when you're measuring performance by token usage, or lines of code, or office attendance... or, in a case I once encountered, manual adherence to a style guide, that everyone was to check against when writing or reviewing anything (and eventually memorize) instead of just configuring a formatting tool and being done with it.
Regarding LLMs in particular, I don't necessarily think the absolutist stance is it here, but it is a technology worker's job to know when you can and should automate things, as well as to know when it's not an effective use of resources to throw technology at something just because.
I'm in two minds on how best to handle these kind of, "but you have to use an LLM" issues. In my heart I'm like you; they hired me to do a job. If I'm doing the job at the rate and quality expected, why should they care if I use an LLM, my brain, or randomly throw mud at the keyboard until something magically works? The practical side of me says, "I like a roof over my head" so if they mandate I have to use an LLM then I'll do it as long as they take responsibility for any negative impact from that decision.
Even though agents are building all of my code now, I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem. There is no practical use, but it make me feel good and sharp for the rest of the day.
For anyone coping with AI I suggest to give it a try, and stick to it for some time, just like with a gym.
I regret not doing this 10 years ago. Just ~20 minutes of leetcode practice for a decade. I could have landed so much better gigs. :-/
Keeping with your example, this is the equivalent of going to the gym just to do a single set on the bench press.
Your brain is still atrophying.
I’ve found aoc/leetcode pretty much reversed the accidental atrophy for me
This is temporary though; other teams are fully embracing AI in their processes, and it's really only a matter of time until all teams use it. We have C-suite instructions to promote AI adoption. AI will slowly creep into software testing, verification, and eventually the requirements management and software development itself. I'm working on some of the pilot projects.
Where I work, I have chores than a claude subscription would knock out in minutes instead of months. But I don’t have permission to run something like that, so I don’t.
Weirdly our contractors can. They wrote it into their contracts. It’s not even fair, really.
They say they’re working on it, but some people might be pushing back.
Do you draw any other conclusion than that your management wants to replace you with the contractors?
That said, their stance has been wavering, given the apparent inevitability that AI-washing of copyrighted works will be rubber stamped. As you say, damn near everyone has now embraced AI and infected their products with their output. The economic shock if this practice was found illegal would crater the stock market, so of course it will be made legal (at least for the big US models whose corps have been spending their lobbying dollars wisely).
Once the outcome becomes sufficiently clear, I expect the tide will turn, and I am not entirely sad about it. I would like to give them a spin for creating one-off tools, running security audits, tackling certain refactoring, analyze log files, and perform other adjacent tasks. But if I have my way, I will never delegate the core tasks of architecture, design, and development.
I can only say that because I am operating as an independent contractor, so I have a little agency to decide what I do.
Also one of my domains is in microcontrollers and using specific hardware that needs bit-banging drivers written for, so it’s unlikely any LLM has enough data to write those things itself.
The LLM generated code are correct about 80% of the time. Sometimes the generated code is overly complicated, has poor performance, missing a few assumptions, etc. that you need to review it carefully. It helps to have a solid and extensive set of tests.
If you mean using a text editor, a shell, and a makefile, then you're not alone by any stretch of the imagination.
If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).
Unfortunately, definitely not. There are lots of people still doing the same as they did a decade ago who have learned very little. Very often the people who knew very little to start with.
:-?
My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.
All implemention decisions are largely decided by claude these days.
We have so many useless tests, so many repetitive code, Every change, even few lines long will trigger 25-50 additional files changes just because everything is so horribly written.
I have heard this was the case before ai, but it got so much worse.
At the end, I believe it comes down to 3 things: care - which before ai you had to have at least some care. Strong leadership - the ai psychosis spreads like a desease in our csuite. Ownership - there is none, every interaction you have about something starts with "but claude thinks that or says this"
I wish we could go back.
Is it fear of the business being copied elsewhere?
Is it because monetary incentives to lessen the workforce?
Is it just all rich people's clubs laundering the same idea that AI will solve their problems, and the Cxx come back from their retreats and make it their stance that all company should use AI because muy buddy at the golf course said it?
Is it the promise of x10 the productivity?
My company has been holding on raises for a few years, but it's open bar on AI usage. And I feel it in the reviews: some are expedited without even a human in the loop. It also outs people that have no care for the result, they push things they don't even understand. The C suite has words like "every developer pushing a MR should be able to explain why and how", and in the same week, push for full automation of the Spec -> Implementation -> MR -> Review flow.
I don't quite understand the endgame here.
I think its a combination of phycosis, detachment from the codebase, and weak critical thinking
Weirdness aside, I'm continuing to write code as I used to, despite the overall company _cultural_ push towards AI, given the lack of direct orders, and pray my output is good enough that the "powers that be" leave me alone.
I am also in the job search process, and am also still noticing plenty of listings that don't mention AI.
The transition of winning an argument change to “claude said…” which are fucking annoying facing this shit in daily basis.
Code base becoming a blackbox where god and AI know what its like, every function have 4 line of paragraph historically describing changes from past to the future.
Im thinking of resigning because i cant bear this shit anymore but seems like its not better in other place.
Its time for me to retire and change career IG. Im sick of this becoming middleman between my manager and the AI
I like building and tweaking computer stuff, and managing agents is a completely different carrer than the one I signed up for. I guess corporate interests fell out of alignment with me with this one, definitely thinking about my career more these days.
Yes, this is the only way I use them. As a better search tool for the collective knowledge, and to do arbitrary queries on a complicated code base.
If there are any mechanical changes, like renaming something or such, I might use an LLM for it as well.
If the company does try to turn the screws and force me to use it more, I'd rather exit the company (and maybe the industry entirely) than become a slop slinger. We'll see how it goes, but for now at least, I think this company has been handling it well.
A colleague does use it extensively on another project, and it's near impossible to follow at some points, even though it's a small project. There's a lot of code duplication, that's for sure. And there was a complete lack of security, as the project started as a simple nodejs based demo, and then sprawled out. I fixed that the old fashioned way on the outside (sessions, auth, and a CRUD API).
I do use LLMs occasionally, for converting code (something they're really good at), and trying to find bugs, that kind of thing. It is really impressive, and it's fucking up education.
As the meme says: start eating healthy now, because your future doctor will have vibed his way through med school.
The rest of us have to clean up and maintain the slop and it's depressing as hell.
I would rather deal with Claude refusing to follow instructions than be forced to write software in a proprietary framework that's been effectively EoL'd by its vendor then use Citrix to deploy software to a Windows box after a month long round of manual testing. The former is slightly annoying whereas the latter is a dire threat to your professional mobility and dignity. Your mileage may vary.
I do think it's more fun to write code, but this isn't about fun it's about delivering a high quality product and no one can do that anymore without AI tools. Knowing you're practicing obsolete skills is depressing
All this bitching does feel a little off to me though, I get it, but I don't think you guys get how bad it sounds from the outside.
LLMs are not perfect, even in enterprise programming. Even in my case, where a few CRUDs may manage 100s of millions of dollars, and the code LLMs produce is actually good enough, for sure comparable with mid developers, most of them, you do need to develop a system to keep everything on track, I've found my balance and honestly? It's good and I enjoy it.
Go into embedded critical systems, that's probably the last thing they will get good at.