I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(
Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)
On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.
> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do.
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.
I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better.
Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work.
It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.
I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot.
Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me:
I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious.
"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem.
In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!
There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.
While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop!
There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)
With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)
Yep. After 40+ years in the business I chose to retire rather than madly pump out code using a robot. Sucked all the joy right out of the craft.
It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building.
It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.
Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans.
Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.
have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not .
And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down.
I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
I don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.
I feel the same way. The only way I found that lets me cope with this is by having 1-2 personal projects, closed source, with me as the only user, where I slowly build things the way I enjoy, and where the outcome is useful software that doesn't try to monetise at the expense of the end user.
yup. the things i disliked most about programming were hyped up bullshit and losing autonomy.
These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both.
I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic.
The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.
I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!
I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans.
Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.
I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).
They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.
I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.
It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.
Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).
I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.
> I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though.
I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it.
A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.
AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself).
I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
I quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day.
One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.
That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
7777332215|1 month ago
abalashov|1 month ago
pawelduda|1 month ago
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
newsoftheday|1 month ago
I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.
itsthecourier|1 month ago
viking123|1 month ago
Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
pydry|1 month ago
They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
keyle|1 month ago
Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.
meetingthrower|1 month ago
It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.
I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
stavros|1 month ago
KellyCriterion|1 month ago
Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
bambax|1 month ago
"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
Aromasin|1 month ago
In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!
There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.
graykey31|1 month ago
bigpeopleareold|1 month ago
There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)
With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)
randcraw|1 month ago
It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building.
It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.
lrvick|1 month ago
Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.
rvz|1 month ago
Might be never or if the software is not used at all.
The perfect and secure software is none.
scirob|1 month ago
And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
lifetimerubyist|1 month ago
Not as long as you think.
https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...
pton_xd|1 month ago
I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
ojr|1 month ago
cloud8421|1 month ago
pydry|1 month ago
These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both.
I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic.
The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.
sodapopcan|1 month ago
cableshaft|1 month ago
Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.
I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).
They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.
I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.
It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.
Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).
I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.
9rx|1 month ago
I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
iberator|1 month ago
abalashov|1 month ago
A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.
AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
miningape|1 month ago
I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
retired|1 month ago
One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.
bko|1 month ago
That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
sarmasamosarma|1 month ago
[deleted]