Unlurker|Replay|About
I DM'd a Korean Presidential Candidate and Ended Up Building His Core Campaign (medium.com)
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Thas was quite fun to read. Thank you for sharing this short time of your (development) life, including all the reasons and logic on why and how.
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Soon to be a Netflix series
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I’m deeply honored. Thank you.
Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free' (theverge.com)
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https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-developers-gen-ai-nexon-arc-raiders I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps. I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not? In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
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I literally do not care what tools you use to write your code.
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Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience. This is discussed right in the article.
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The "hand made" era of software
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
After 15 years, I use Outlook as my build pipeline (iwriteaboutcode.blogspot.com)
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Memories of waiting for months to get access to a MS SQL database and ending up putting an Access database on a network share for multiple user access instead. A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!
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I knew a guy who would brag that he used Outlook as his build system 20 years ago. Builds would take 9 to 24 months depending on the complexity of the project. But, as the CTO of a mid-sized software company, it worked for him.
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that guy is a fuckin legend
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As a dev currently working at a company where getting an access request fulfilled can sometimes take weeks, I feel this author's pain. But it seems like an enormous security hole, even with a codeword "password". The author didn't mention it, but I hope they're using whatever version of their company's E2E email encryption is for these messages.
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Yeah, this is textbook "shadow IT" that could easily lead to something going seriously wrong. It's a fun example, but not something to aspire to. Ultimately the problem is that in a lot of big corps, IT is basically unaccountable for setting things up wrong. Their only KPI is tickets closed, not the quality or success rate of their fixes.
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If your build pipeline is anything more than a deploy.sh file containing docker build -t your-docker-registry/xxx:latest . docker push your-docker-registry/xxx:latest kubectl rollout restart deployment xxx-deployment you are a hack, a fraud, an overengineer and someone who should NOT work as software or devops engineer.
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Thankfully k8s is not overengineered or you’d have pie on your face.
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No plan survives contact with the enemy. Sure, "docker push" is all fine and well until "after two weeks, [your] coworker still does not have access to the server endpoint that he and [you] would need". And then what? Do you quit your job for fear that someone calls you a hack?
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Uses kubernetes, blames others for over engineering. Are we living in a parody? Oh wait…
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If your build pipeline is anything more than a monkey scratching bits into a spinning disk using a needle, you are a fraud.
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yeah sure....
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Yes, all development is just backend web development and CRUD apps. If you're doing anything else, are you really an engineer ? bwahaha.
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Wait, my docker registry has no authorization? Uh oh
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Mom, didn't we talk about not posting to hacker news when you're like this?
Kagi Hub Belgrade (blog.kagi.com)
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Glad I stopped subscribing to this pro-Russia company that keeps wasting my subscription on things other than making a good search engine.
> Belgrade sits at the crossroads of East and West Plenty of European countries sits at the crossroads of East and West. But only one is openly flirting with Russia and is an entry point for Russians in Europe. There is little point in opening a European office outside of EU, ignoring potential of the single market. So I would guess it's better to reformulate this as "we have opened an office to easier collaborate with sanctioned individuals". I was eyeing Kagi subscription previously, but now I guess I would have to do some research regarding their work ties, before committing.
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Serbia is probably less attached to Russia than at any point in the last 200 years. Secondly, Belgrade is a city with millions of people, and a great one at that. The company is almost certainly opening an office there because it's a cool place to be, and not because they are trying to make a geopolitical statement. For some reason, opening an office in a larger country ( all of which have similar ethical issues) doesn't come with accusations like this.
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Thanks. Sounds BS consipracy but hey, gave me another reason to love Kagi.
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Same boat, and I didn't even know about the Yandex stuff, hard pass.
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I also didn't didn't know about Yandex usage (and founder stance regarding it) until today. Well, it's a pity.
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I'm having trouble following the suspicion here. The founder lived in Belgrade for decades before moving to the US, so opening an office there seems like a straightforward decision: you build where you have roots, local knowledge, and existing connections. That's not a red flag... As for Serbia itself: yes, it's not in the EU, but it's been in the accession process since 2012. The timeline is slow, but the country is economically integrated with Europe. If we're treating a Serbian office as inherently suspicious, that's a bar most of the tech industry wouldn't clear.
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Someone recently claimed here they are using Yandex search but I don't know of any evidence. Also didn't Yandex "leave" Russia (legally)?
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> Also didn't Yandex "leave" Russia (legally)? I may be wrong here, please correct me if needed, but from what I understood from the news it was actually reverse of that. Yandex during the "smaller" war period, had a Netherlands parent holding to play pretend they are European company, and last year that holding sold their shares back to some Russian companies. So it looks like that it's Europe left Yandex, and not Yandex left Russia. But again, the whole house of shell cards is so complex there that I'm not sure about it.
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Yandex is as entrenched in Russia as anyone could be. It's quickly becoming the state's goto IT company with products for all aspects of everyday life (many of them in leading market positions). It's the 'everything' company in there that is fully controlled by the state China-style.
Companies are trying to weasel out of sanctions that target common people and arbitrary kafkaesque visa rules. Shocker, I know.
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You'd surely be shocked learning what those common people are doing in some parts of the world, like Ukraine :)
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It should be easy to imagine that the russians committing war crimes in Ukraine and the russians fleeing conscription/political persecution for opposing the state by moving to the few countries that would take them are not the same group of people
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Not exactly true, soldiers returning from the front can actually leave and move abroad. Also, with the amount of "hybrid-warfare" taking place in Europe it's safe to say not all russians "fleeing" russia are exactly well-intentioned. Let's skip the discussion about the advantages of having russian minorities in your own country, shall we?
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I thought 'those' common people decided to stop sponsoring the war by leaving. But surely one can see how adding more idiotic rules and roadblocks for them just might make staying a more attractive option :)
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I am sure most russians leaving have left because they are against imperialist expansion and would prefer a free Ukraine, not because they have realized they might have more skin in the game once the 3-days special operation has failed.
I cancelled my Kagi account following the positions taken by the company on Yandex issue. Did things change ? I'm not saying the opening of an HQ in Serbia is linked. It's obvious this is linked to the founder's origins and that's OK. Just wondering if I should reconsider my subscription to this great product. (Serbia's facing risks of petrol shortage because of Russia's war, just saw this in the news)
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For interested readers, here is the CEO (Vlad) answer to the ties between Kagi and Yandex (November 2024): https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19
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> The job of a search engine is to produce the most relevant search results, period. Unclear how all the random side projects align with this goal tbh.
Belgrade, historically, was a "gateway between East and West" and in some ways it still is: as a non-EU member in Europe it has access to a broader range of markets than a lot of other cities. I think recently, the wave of Russian tech workers fleeing Russia has also elevated its "tech hub" status.
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> Russian tech workers fleeing Russia has also elevated its "tech hub" status. Fleeing as in seeking asylum? Or fleeing as in sanctions? If the latter, besides the Slavic nations, I'd have thought Germany, the UAE, Israel, and Canada to be more popular?
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Fleeing as in "I don't want to die in Putin's war". I've heard from friends that it's actually becoming an issue with locals there (the overwhelming number of Russians who have moved there) to the point where it's beginning to strain the relationship between Russia and Serbia, who have historically been very closely aligned.
When you like something and want it to succeed, it’s discouraging to see that thing waste its resources. Especially if you contributed those resources. I never understood how this very simple position flies over certain heads.
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There’s a difference between disagreeing with a marketing stunt, and saying "I stopped using them because of that". But I guess that also flew over our heads, dumb as we are.
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You don't seem dumb. Its not about intelligence. You don't understand because you don't have any convictions, and you can't fathom putting any kind of difficulty (no matter how trivial) on yourself for what you believe is right.
EU council reaches position on Chat Control (consilium.europa.eu)
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Is there still a loophole for politicians not to be tracked? Because if so, some people will make a lot of money by creating a political party and turning citizens into politicians for yearly fee and thus bypassing this whole law.
I am ashamed to be Danish. Where are the mass protests of hundreds of thousands, the mass walkouts from our workplaces until our government at last respects our human dignity? Our government has today turned the EU into a tool for total surveillance I don't know if there can be any return from. Our democratic processes have been abused, and our politicians shown to be nothing but craven, self-interested agents of control.
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What about going out in front of your city hall with a poster saying no-chat-control? You risk nothing, do you?
Honest question. The EU was created as an economic and trade institution. How has it morphed into a wierd political institution, which NATO was already supposed to be? The root question: how did an organization that ushered in things like the Euro become a body that decides whether Europeans are allowed to have personal privacy?
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ever closer union in the Treaty of Rome the entire point is to build a country called Europe and the EU is built on the "Monnet method", where it slowly ratchets forward taking more power from national parliaments and giving it to the EU council/commission (with a useless parliament there to make it appear democratic) the UK leaving is the only example of the ratchet being reversed
That treaty was established just over a decade after Hitler surrendered, when there were two Germanys, an Iron curtain across Europe, and a lot of other things which changed significantly after the Wall fell. Surely you would agree that those words meant something quite different then than they do now? I don't think my framing was sensationalist at all. Chat Control is using the threat of child porn to make people forget the reasons why the ECHR cares so deeply about privacy. I'm not sure why Denmark is pushing it so hard, but governments have long feared and hated encryption.
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Not only are you moving your goalposts from "this wasn't the original purpose" (it was - it's part of the founding document!), but it has been reaffirmed and strengthened over and over again since: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7230/ Don't get me wrong - I, too, care about privacy and think Chat Control is a horrible idea, that thankfully seems to be getting shut down. That doesn't mean the EU is somehow not legitimate as a governing body.
Await Is Not a Context Switch: Understanding Python's Coroutines vs. Tasks (mergify.com)
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I think this article is missing the point a bit. It's saying that the action of calling an async function (e.g. one you've written) isn't itself a yield point. The only yield points are places where we the call would block for external events like IO or time - `await asyncio.sleep(100)` would be one of those. This is true, but surely fairly irrelevant? Any async function call has somewhere in its possible call tree one of those yield points. If it didn't then it wouldn't need to be marked async .
Asynchronous and parallel programming are concepts I've never really learned, and admittedly scared to use, because I never really understand what the code is doing or even the right way of writing such code. Does anyone have any good resources that helped you learn this and have a good mental model of the concepts involved?
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You’ll never learn it by reading something. You have to experience it. Get your hands dirty. Write a simple single-threaded http server that takes strings and hashes them with something slow like bcrypt with a high cost value (or, just sleep before returning). Write some integration tests (doesn’t have to be fancy) that hammer the server with 10, 100, 1000 requests. Time how performant (or not performant) the bank of requests are. Now try to write a threaded server where every request spins up a new thread. What’s the performance like? (Hint: learn about the global interpreter lock (GIL)) Hmm, maybe you’re creating too many threads? Learn about thread pools and why they’re better for constraining resources. Is performance better? Try a multiprocessing.Pool instead to defeat the GIL. Want to try async? Do the same thing! But because the whole point of async is to do as much work on one thread with no idle time, and something like bcrypt is designed to hog the CPU, you’ll want to replace bcrypt with an await asyncio.sleep() to simulate something like a slow network request. If you wanted to use bcrypt in an async function, you’ll definitely want to delegate that work to a multiprocessing.Pool. Try that next. Learning can be that simple. Read the docs for Thread, multiprocessing, and asyncio. Python docs are usually not very long winded and most importantly they’re more correct than some random person vibe blogging.
Yes, but not between "parent before" and "child start" (or between "child end" and "parent after")
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Ah, OK. That makes sense.
> But isn't it true for JavaScript too? I don't think so. It's been a while since I've bled on tricky async problems in either language, but I'm pretty sure in JS it would be [...] parent_before parent_after child_before [...] In JS, there are microtasks and macrotasks. setTimeout creates macrotasks. `.then` (and therefore `await`) creates microtasks. Microtasks get executed BEFORE macrotasks, but they still get executed AFTER the current call stack is completed. From OP (and better illustrated by GP's example) Python's surprise is that it's just putting the awaited coroutine into the current call stack. So `await` doesn't guarantee anything is going into a task queue (micro or macro) in python.
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> Microtasks get executed BEFORE macrotasks Correct. > they still get executed AFTER the current call stack is completed. Correct. > I'm pretty sure in JS it would be [...] Your understanding of JS event loop is correct but you reached the wrong conclusion.
I don't care how well your "AI" works (fokus.cool)
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I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples. I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.
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> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism? Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? > the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. A fate that designers, writers, translators, tailors or book-binders lived through before us What is it with this perceived right to fulfilling, but also highly paid , employment in software engineering? Nobody is stopping anyone from doing things by hand that machines can do at 10 times the quality and 100 times the speed. Some people will even pay for it, but not many. Much will be relegated to unpaid pastime activities. That's just human progress in a nutshell.
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We don't care that you don't care
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I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?
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The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit: sentence fixed.
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> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.
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I always thought years of experience in a language was a silly job requirement. LLMs allow me to write Rust code as a total Rust beginner and allows me to create a valuable SaaS while most experienced Rust developer never built anything that made $1 outside of their work. I wouldn't say devaluation, my programming experience definitely helps with debugging. LLMs eliminate boilerplate, not engineering judgement and product decisions.
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I really love LLMs for Rust. Before them I was an intermediate Rust dev, and only used it in specific circumstances where the extra coding overhead paid off. Now I write just about everything in Rust because why not? If I can vibe code Rust about as fast as Python, why would I ever use Python outside of ML?
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well, maybe adopt an outlook that things you think are real aren't, and just maybe it will work just as fine if you completely ignore them. going forward ignoring ai that are smarter than autocomplete may be just the way to go
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The increasingly rough tone against "AI" critics in the comments and the preposterous talking points ("you are not a senior developer if you do not get value from 'AI'") is an indication that the bubble will burst soon. It is the tool obsessed people who treat everything like a computer game that like "AI" for software engineering. Most of them have never written anything substantial themselves and only know the Jira workflow for small and insignificant tickets.
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It's up to you to use candles instead of lightbulbs
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> We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft. Valuation is fundamentally connected to scarcity. 'Devaluation' is just negative spin for making it plentyful. When cicumstances changed to make something less scarce, one cannot expect to get the same value for it because of past valuation. That is just rent-seeking.
I honestly don't get vibe coding. I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore. At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours). I don't understand how anyone can work like that and have confidence in their code.
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> I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours). Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally an activity of theory building, not just program text production. The code itself is merely the artifact of the real work. You must not confuse the artifact (the source code) with the mind that produced the artifact. The theory is not contained in the text output of the theory-making process. The problems of program modification arise from acting on the assumption that programming is just text production; the decay of a program is a result of modifications made by programmers without a proper grasp of the underlying theory. LLMs cannot obtain Naur's Ryleian "theory" because they "ingest the output of work" rather than developing the theory by doing the work. LLMs may _appear_ to have a theory about a program, but this is an illusion. To believe that LLMs can write software, one must mistakenly assume that the main activity of the programmer is simply to produce source code, which is (according to Naur) inaccurate.
The author may not care but I doubt people care that a software has been developed by AI instead of a human. Just like nobody cares whenever a hole has been dug by hand using a shovel or by an excavator.
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The problem is the AI excavator destroying the road because it hallucinated the ditch.
Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that. (In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)
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I mean sure but none of these even claimed to help you do things you were already doing . If your job is writing code none of these help you do that. That being said the metaverse happened but it just wasn't the metaverse those weird cringy tech libertarians wanted it to be. Online spaces where people hang out are bigger than ever. Segways also happened they just changed form to electric scooters.
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I detest LLMs , but I want to point out that segway tech became the basis for EUCs , which are based https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 These things are wicked, and unlike some new garbage javascript framework, it's revolutionary technology that regular people can actually use and benefit from. The mobility they provide is insane. https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/is_this_even_real_life_anymore/
If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
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Sorry you're being downvoted even though you're 100% correct. There are use cases where the poor LLM reliability is as good or better than the alternatives (like search/summarization), but arguing over whether LLMs are reliable is silly. And if you need reliability (or even consistency, maybe) for your use case, LLMs are not the right tool.
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Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are. Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space. My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should. LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.
I’m not a native English speaker so I checked on the definition of reliability the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. My linter are reliable when it catches bad patterns I wanted it to catch. My editor is reliable when I can edit code with it and the commands do what they’re supposed to do. So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time. It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
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I'm a native English speaker. Your understanding and usage of the word "reliability" is correct, and that's the exact word I'd use in this conversation. The GP is playing a pointless semantics game.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world). And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers. If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts. What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
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You sound exactly like that turkey from Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal. Until Thanksgiving.
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> What exactly is being de-valuated We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them. How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND" Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless. The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/ Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.
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> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy Eh? I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now. No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."
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Your complete lack of empathy is going to be your undoing. Might want to check in on that.
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The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack for standardized tests (Leetcode) and the time to grid some prep. The compensation and hiring for that kind of inexpert work were completely out of sync with anything sustainable but held up for almost a decade because money was cheap. Now, money is held much more tightly and we stumbled into a tech that can cheaply regurgitate a lot of so the trivial inexpert work, meaning the bottom fell out of these untenable, overpaid jobs. You and I may not be effected, having charted a different path through the industry and built some kind of professional career foundation, but these kids who were (irresponsibly) promised an easy upper middle class life are still real people with real life plans, who are now finding themselves in a deeply disappointing and disorienting situation. They didn't believe the correction would come, let alone so suddenly, and now they don't know how they're supposed to get themselves back on track for the luxury lifestyle they thought they legitimately earned.
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>the job is easy software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires
No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating. Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?
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Admittedly, there's the responses in this thread with people saying "I'm in <some country that isn't the US> and the market here is bad, too".
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor quality outputs imo. And as that ignorance moat gets smaller, this becomes harder to pull off.
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> But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. This sounds kind of logical, but really isn't. In reality you can ASSIGN a task to a junior dev and expect them to eventually complete it, and learn from the experience as well. Sure there'll likely be some interaction between the junior dev and mentor, and this is part of the learning process - something DESIREABLE since it leads to the developer getting better. In contrast, you really cant "assign" something to an LLM. You can of course try to, and give it some "vibe coding" assignment like "build me a backend component to read the data from the database", but the LLM/agent isn't an autonomous entity that can take ownership of the assignment and be expected to do whatever it takes (e.g. coming back to you and asking for help) to get it done. With todays "AI" technology it's the AI that needs all the handholding, and the person using the AI is the one who has effectively taken the assignment, not the LLM. Also, given the inability of LLMs to learn on the job, using an LLM as a tool to help get things done is going to be a groundhog day experience of having to micro-manage the process in the same way over and over again each time you use it... time that would have been better invested in helping a junior dev get up to speed and in the future be an independent developer that tasks can indeed be assigned to.
LLMs vs human Handholding the human pays off in the long run more than hand holding the llm, which requires more hand holding anyway. Claude doesn't get better as I explain concepts to it the same way a jr engineer does.
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Maybe see it less as a junior and replacement for humans. See it more as a tool for you! A tool so you can do stuff you used to delegate/dump to a junior, do now yourself.
If one is a junior the goal is to become a senior though. Not to remain a junior.
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Yes, but the barrier to become a senior is what’s currently in dispute
> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow and Google.
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Around 80% of my work is easy while the remaining 20% is very hard. At this stage the hard stuff is far outside the capability of LLM but the easy stuff is very much within its capabilities. I used to hire contractors to help with that 80% work but now I use LLMs instead. It’s far cheaper, better quality, and zero hassle. That’s 3 junior / mid level jobs that are gone now. Since the hard stuff is combinatorial complexity I think by the time LLM is good enough to do that then it’s probably good enough to do just about everything and we’ll be living in an entirely different world.
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Today's high-end LLMs can do a lot of unsupervised work. Debug iterations are at least junior level. Audio and visual output verification is still very week (i.e. to verify web page layout and component reactivity). Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs. Currently if you have only text output all new LLMs can iterate flawlessly and solve problems on it. New backend dev from scratch is completely doable with vibe coding now, with some exceptions around race conditions and legacy code comprehension.
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Completely agree. I use LLM like I use stackoverflow, except this time i get straight to the answer and no one closes my question and marks it as a duplicate, or stupid. I dont want it integrated into my IDE, i'd rather just give it the information it needs to get me my result. But yeah, just another google or stackoverflow.
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It's me. I'm the LM having work assigned to me that junior dev used to get. I'm actually just a highly proficient BA who has always almost read code, followed and understood news about software development here and on /. before, but generally avoided writing code out of sheer laziness. It's always been more convenient to find something easier and more lucrative in those moments if decision where I actually considered shifting to coding as my profession. But here I am now. After filling in for lazy architects above me for 20 years while guiding developers to follow standards and build good habits and learning important lessons from talking to senior devs along the wa, guess what, I can magically do it myself now. The LM is the junior developer that I used to painstakingly explain the design to, and it screws it up half as much as the braindead and uncaring jr Dev used to. Maybe I'm not a typical case, but it shows a hint of where things might be going. This will only get easier as the tools become more capable and mature into something more reliable.
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LM?
> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. And where will it be in 5-10 years? Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations". Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns , and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable plateau. If we want the difference between now and 5-10 years from now and the difference between now and 5-10 years ago to look similar, we're going to need a new breakthrough. And those don't come on command.
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Right about where it is today with better integrations? One year is the difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 4.5. We're not hitting diminishing returns yet (mostly because of exponential capex scaling, but still). We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory, which means we can expect similar performance boosts year over year. The key to keep in mind is that LLMs are a giant bag of capabilities, and just because we hit diminishing returns on one capability, that doesn't say much if anything about your ability to scale other capabilities.
But in the end, we didn't end up with less factories that do more, we ended up with more factories that does more. Why wouldn't the same happen here? Instead of these programmers jamming out boilerplate 24/7, why are they unable to improve their skill further and move with the rest of the industry, if that's needed? Just like other professions adopt to how society is shaped, why should programming be an exception to that?
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And how is the quality of life for those factory workers? It's almost like the craft of making physical things has been devalued even if we're making more physical things than ever.
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge. But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love. Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less. But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck. If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.
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Mental exhaustion is a thing, too.
I work remote and i hate it, sitting all day is killing me, my 5 minute daily stand-up is nowhere near enough social interaction for a whole day's work. I've been looking for a role better suited to me for over a year, but the market is miserable. I miss having jobs where at least a lot of the time i was moving around or working directly with other people. More than anything else i miss casual conversation with coworkers (which still happened with excruciating rarity even when i was doing most of my programming in an office). I'm glad you love programming and find the career ideal. I don't mean to harp or whine, just pointing out your ideals aren't universal even amount programmers.
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Get a standing desk and a walking treadmill! It’s genuinely changed my life. I can focus easier, I get my steps in, and it feels like I did something that day.
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.
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>> A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now. That is not unique to programming or tech generally. The overall US job market is kind of shit right now.
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Likewise with experienced devs who find themselves out of work due to the neverending mass layoffs. There's a huge difference between the perspective of someone currently employed versus that of someone in the market for a role, regardless of experience level. The job market of today is nothing like the job market of 3 years ago. More and more people are finding that out every day.
Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find. If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
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> Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find. This is a ridiculous statement. I know plenty of people (that are not developers) that make around the same as I do and enjoy their work as much as I do. Yes, software development is a great field to be in, but there's plenty of others that are just as good.
Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.
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Do other professions expect you to work during personal time? At least blue collar people are done when they get told they're done I get your viewpoint though, physically exhausting work is probably much worse. I do want to point out that 40 hours has always been above average, and right now its the default
There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
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According to that site, there were more tech layoffs in 2022 than in 2024 or 2025. Doesn't that speak against the "AI is taking tech jobs" hypothesis?
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing. Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
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Comfortable and easy, but satisfying? I don't think so. I've had jobs that were objectively worse that I enjoyed more and that were better for my mental health.
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> never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer I find it... very strange that you think software development is less mentally taxing than physical labor.
A cell so minimal that it challenges definitions of life (quantamagazine.org)
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> the bacterium Carsonella ruddii, which lives as a symbiont within the guts of sap-feeding insects, has an even smaller genome than Sukunaarchaeum, at around 159,000 base pairs 159 000 base pairs is ~320 Kbit, or 40 KBytes. I wonder, if that is the minimum size of a cell firmware. Also, if the cell is that simple, can we study it exhaustively and completely? Like, decipher every base pair in DNA, and determine what it is responsible for. And make an interactive website for that.
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This is the biological equivalent of sectorlisp.
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Very impressive! To be clear, this is not the smallest known bacterial genome; only the smallest known archaeal bacterial genome, at 238k base pairs. In the article they mention C. ruddii , with a smaller 159k base pair genome. But according to wikipedia, it seems N. deltocephalinicola , at 112k base pairs, may be the smallest known bacterial genome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasuia_deltocephalinicola
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Still far, far too complex to occur "randomly," which is fascinating. The odds of 112k bases arranging in any meaningful way by chance within a membrane are the kind of thing you wouldn't get if you ran a trillion trillion trillion universes. There's many hypotheses, basically all different variations on "soup of organic compounds forming complex catalytic cycles that eventually result in the soup producing more similar soup, at which point it begins to be subject to differential selection." It's a reasonable idea but where did this happen, and do the conditions still exist? If we went to that place would it still be happening? There's reason to believe the answer would be no because modern lifeforms would probably find this goo nutritious. So life may have chemically pulled up the ladder from itself once it formed. This of course assumes no to more fanciful options: panspermia that pushes the origin back to the beginning of the cosmos and gives you more billions of years, creation by a God or some other kind of supernatural or extra-dimensional entity, etc.
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A nitpick: Although similar in some aspects, archaea are not bacteria; they are classified under their own phylogenetic domain.
From the paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1 > ... we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome— from a dinoflagellate-associated microbial community.
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For comparison, the smallest bacteria genome, nasuia deltocephalinicola, is 139 kbp.
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