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Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
72 points by sph 17 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 94 comments
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.



I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me).

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.


As a fellow contrarian, I applaud your resolve. I was constructively dismissed for refusing the COVID vax a few years ago. But I think in this case where there was no concern about output, it would be better for you to just pretend to use it. Then you would soon become the most/only knowledgeable dev, be able to leverage that into promotions or new jobs, etc. I know it's distasteful to pretend to believe what you don't believe, but this might be a serious enough matter to justify it.

I went through interviews recently; I told everyone what I think they wanted to hear about my AI usage based on their demeanor; I got a new job; I pretend to use AI at this new job. Either we're right and AI mandates get walked back, so we're in a good spot, or we're wrong and we need to hold onto our jobs for dear life.


Being unwilling to change or changing too much are both equally going to get you fired. I’m the later so I feel your pain. At companies you have to turn your brain off and bahhh with the sheep.


Regardless of if a new tool is useful or not, if it’s being pushed internally then embrace it.

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.


Not OP, but…

“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’” —Mitch Hedberg

LLM-assisted coding is basically an entirely different career from software engineering, and not everyone wants to do that. (Ditto here; fortunately, I’m self-employed.)


Seems to me you at least have to try using them, so you can make a coherent case why you work just as well or better without them.


I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no? I think my case was made just as well by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work after three years of the rest of my company diving headlong into the vibe-pit.


>I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no?

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.


> Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed.

Depends where you are. In the UK at least they can't force a material change of role on you or sake you for refusing. They can make you redundant, of course, which amounts to the same thing if you are relatively new to the industry.

> Your employer doesn't actually care about this.

That is true.

> They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them.

Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency very soon, that balance is going to change a bit at least temporarily as all the investment capital that the industry is currently haemorrhaging starts to get called in (or it turns out that half the money being passed around in circles no longer really exists as soon as things turn as the value is being propped up by people believing in the value).

If that doesn't happen and the hype continues then dev work is set to be commoditised as much as hospitality work, and we'll end up screwed whether we've played the game or not. It is some way into happening for designers and writers, the bottom has fallen out of employment in accountancy and other areas already too, dev work in various forms is very much next if things continue on the current path.

> what they're being directed to do

I'm not being directed to go AI, yet. That is definitely something that is blocking the light from the other end of the tunnel, but how long that tunnel is has yet to be determined.

> probably not the best bet for someone to keep around

If being kept around means a future sitting in a room alone with nothing for company but Claude/similar, I'd much rather not thanks.


My “coherent case” is that they'll take away the few bits of the job that I still like. Remote working has an undesirable effect on my mental health, and I have no choice about that, I'm not using tools I have principals against on top of that, and I've avoided managing for many years so the “it is like having your own team” thing people bang on about is the exact opposite of appealing to me. I'd rather leave the industry completely if push comes to shove, which I'm pretty sure it eventually will. I'm financially more lucky than many (mortgage paid, no partner or offspring, some savings) so I can survive on the pay cut that this will very likely involve¹. They can't sack me - it is a material change of role³ and under UK law you can't be forced in to a materially different role nor sacked for refusing⁵. I'm going to keep doing the job I signed up for until I can't (either I get sick of it, or they get sick of me!), then I'll move on. Of course when it comes time to pay the piper because all that investment capital (ref https://isaiprofitable.com/) can't just be written off forever, maybe there will still be room for a few of us Luddites⁶ :)

--------

[1] Though if things go the way of the hype, there will either be many fewer dev jobs, or most of them will become lower paid, or both - so long term that might not be as big a deal if you aren't one of the top people²

[2] Which I know I aren't!

[3] if it isn't, then the claims that it is revolutionary are false

[5] I could be made redundant by the same distinction, by being given the choice of redundancy or moving to an AI-based role, but I can live with that

[6] Especially those of use who have been around long enough to have a pile of experience/knowledge, generally or for a specific industry.


I don't think the tide has turned, it's just being assumed that you use them now.


I'm in a similar position. Our CEO who went full AI psychosis right when OpenClaw first came out. Directive from the top was to "use AI for everything" with no real regard for if it helped productivity, service delivery, or quality of output. That was very quickly reigned back in when they saw the bill. Multiple people using tens of thousands of dollars of tokens in a week, with no demonstrable value.

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.


I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get.

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.


What a company considers to be "performance" or "insubordination" can certainly still be about office politics. Not that I'm saying this is necessarily the case here, but they're not a hard either/or.

For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy is 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 required two human beings to check every line of code against a set of conventions, 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 don't know parent's company or use case. I don't know if they were doing something with it that actually enhanced productivity, or just tracking tokens. I don't know if it enhanced their product, or just shoehorned AI into it for investor-driven buzzword utilization. So I'm also not an absolutist on what you're saying.

It could be that parent is too rigid, but (as much as I'm not asking for all this context either) I don't think there's enough information here to be certain about that.


> 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.

They don't have to "go away"; managers just have to stop requiring their usage. In a sane business they will care about output, not tokens. If OP cannot keep up his output because he refuses to use it, sure, fire him. But in my experience the good devs can still keep up. Your post is only true if AIs improve enough that no developer can possibly keep up without them. That is not today, and maybe not tomorrow.


The job is to make widgets, not to use specific tools to make widgets. When has that ever been the case before? None of my bosses ever gave a shit what editors I used, for example. Certainly not the CEOs.

You sound weirdly angry and aggressive — like in a “back away slowly” kind of way. Relax, and stop gatekeeping the industry. As strange as it may sound to you, I expect that there will always be segments of it that don’t rely on LLMs.


that's a bit harsh. the job is to solve a problem, implement a solution. as a developer i should have some leeway on how i accomplish that. be able to choose the tools that i believe are the best for the given task. there may be constraints, but using an LLM as a constraint does not make sense because the LLM affects the process but not the outcome.


I would argue the same in most situations, but let’s be honest: what matters most to most employers is their employees falling in line. There is some sense to this: it is easier to manage a bunch of people doing things more-or-less the same way, but I do ultimately agree that professionals should be treated more like professionals.


Seeing as how LLMs objectively increase performance when used correctly, I'd support the company's decision to let you go for specifically performance reasons. I'm not saying you should be all in on LLMs end to end, but there are individual processes in every workflow that can be enhanced by the tool. If you find those, you will perform better than you could without LLMs, no question.


I’ve learned for myself that I need to write code just to keep my brain in shape - same as going to the gym to be healthy.

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.


Agreed, there's a couple of bad behavioral shifts I noted for me when doing agentic coding:

- Doing too much at the same time, it is super exhausting, and I get nervous and stressed

- Sycophancy makes me overestimate myself

- When my stress meets external pressure, quality goes down. The little voice of 'surely the AI got it right' can lead to defects and code quality going down.

Except for doing some manual coding, I've started doing a couple of other things that are probably just healthy regardless of using AI heavily in day to day life:

- Do literally nothing for at least half an hour. Read something written by humans, even better if it is fiction.

- Do something that makes you feel stupid. And don't use AI to help you through it. (That could be Leetcode, but for me it is learning about statistics)

- Slow down when you feel like things are moving too fast. By far the hardest thing, but the moment I realize I'm trying to rush for a deadline, I'm going out for a walk. Realistically, I'm moving 3-8x faster than before, this little delay is nothing, and keeps me sane and quality on a good level.


I've settled on writing my own code for about 30-60 minutes per day. One benefit I've noticed is that it helps me be a bit more critical and questioning of decisions made in the code as compared to just doing code review of the LLM's output. I think this ends up being a nice balance.


I think this is a really good idea; I usually do this for about a month until I tell myself my time is better spent building or playing something that I don't have to convince myself that I truly enjoy.


Smart. I've been thinking about doing the same.

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. :-/


As the saying goes, “the best time to start would have been 10 years ago. The second best time is today”


>I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem.

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.


Sure about that? The effort put into a leetcode medium or hard is usually way above the kind of code i’m mostly doing at work — and realistically i only have at most 2 hours a day of that level of work in me, the rest is the autopilot code, reviews meetings, docs etc.

I’ve found aoc/leetcode pretty much reversed the accidental atrophy for me


Leetcode is about learning an algorithm/data structure. Programming in general is about much more than that. Knowing minimax and ring buffers doesn’t help much in knowing whether what your LLM does makes sense. For that you need to work on more open ended questions.


There is more to software engineering than solving code puzzles. What about debugging, writing clean code, writing effective tests, architecture, optimization, profiling etc.? None of these are exercised by doing leetcode. Use it or lose it.


Well i’ve been working through adventofcode in various languages and im def spending a lot of time in my debugger.

shrug


In my opinion going to the gym for one bench press is better than sitting at home watching tv.

Would love to hear your suggestions on how to stay in ”mental” shape in the AI age.


>Would love to hear your suggestions on how to stay in ”mental” shape in the AI age.

Work on stuff without the use of AI?

I am building a Vulkan game engine in my spare time. I use LLMs sparingly for search, rubber ducking, and occasionally code review. 100% of the code is handwritten.

I could surely vibe code this project to completion in a few weeks, but then I would have robbed myself of learning how to build a game engine in Vulkan.

I also have read ~20 books in the past year. Reading helps exercise a different part of my brain (and it's enjoyable!).

reply


I used to be a baker and baked all sort of intricate breads and sweets.

Now a machine does it for me.

To stay in shape every morning I bake a single loaf.


I am working on an embedded device where AI coding has been contractually prohibited. I use it for learning about APIs and modern tools, but all of the code comes from my brain. The reason is that the issue of AI copyrights has not been resolved, and this product will be sold to parts of the government that care.

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.


That seems like folly, since some courts somewhere will surely, at some point, find these LLMs to be in (IMO, fairly obvious) violation of copyright and/or license terms. Especially when it’s geopolitically expedient. Especially as the rage over AI builds in the general populace.

Congrats! Now your product can’t be sold in X arbitrary countries. Or it’s auto-GPL licensed and you’re forced to release your code.


We still have some product development software teams at my company that have not changed at all in the last year. We develop medical products in the U.S., so it is heavily regulated and processes change very slowly. We also require reviews from our legal team, so it takes a while for any new contract or agreement to be approved.

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.


There are so, so many. You just generally won’t hear about it here.

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.


> Weirdly our contractors can. They wrote it into their contracts. It’s not even fair, really.

Do you draw any other conclusion than that your management wants to replace you with the contractors?


The people who originally hired them most certainly did. It just didn’t work out that way, and they’re gone now. Quite a few people were lost in between, though.


The code we write here is all human-generated. There’s been an initiative to explore LLM usage. So far it’s been in a reviewer role only, as in “here’s some things I found that you could fix”, and then humans discuss each one and determine if it’s valid and how to fix it.

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.


It's now like coding using the socratic method. Knowing the right questions is now the hard part. And you need to know the context to ask the right questions. Yes, I'm not typing in as much code or reading as much code directly, but still figuring out how to produce a good solution.


Having a weird experience with this at work. We are being told to use it, but the amount of flip flopping on whether or not we can use ChatGPT or Codex or anything else has left a lot of us without any clear direction. One day it’s allowed, the next day IT security guys have blocked it. Local models are also not allowed. I’m carrying on coding everything myself, because I can’t keep changing my workflow when IT changes their mind every second day. Despite this, the directive from the CIO is that by next year 70-80% of code must be AI generated. Last I checked only 2% of the company was actually given a license for codex. So idk man


That sounds hellish


Every four months or so we try getting hyped on agents for ~ a week. Up to this point the answer has always been a pretty solid "nope this sucks back to manual code." The agentically coded parts of the codebase that came from these trials are palpably more annoying than the rest. However, the current trial is going better than the last ones have (Fable 5.1 really is astonishing). On the other hand, each other trial started with a honeymoon so it's up in the air.


It is actually pretty nice that now we can spin up an isolated copy of our whole system with one command line call- this was mandatory for letting agents run wild trying things, but mostly now it makes manual development and onboarding easier.


Graphics programmer who still codes by hand here. I use LLMs for search, and for rubber ducking. I would not disrespect the years I've put into this craft by outsourcing my thinking. Nor do I want to wake up in ten years and realize I have willingly made myself stupid through overuse of these tools.


I still write code myself but I do use LLM. I use them for exploring ideas, explaining things, look up syntax, look up API/reference, look up algorithms, write tests, write duplicate code, write small functions that can be reviewed easily, do code reviews, find bugs, do performance review, do complexity analysis, etc.

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.


I kind of do. Not by will, but because as a consultant i'm most of the time constrained by the tooling and environment i can use at my client's. It's hard enough to build a reliable unit test pipeline or ci/cd, so even if i can use the agents built into databricks, i don't control the harness and i cannot build the necessary guardrails needed to use agents in a mature way. It sucks and i think it will hold me back on future projects.


I don't code much in my position (State of California), but I'm pretty sure the public sector/government is a solid bet. Government has a major reluctance to use (and depend) on techniques and tools that haven't been proven out for like 5+ years. I suspect that most government coders' practices aren't at a 2021 best practices level yet.


I am a lead developer working in Cyber Security. We are just now integrating co-pilot reviews into our pipeline to help speed along the initial review process and weed out any surface level bugs. We still have no agentic coding, and I'm not sure we will for at least another year. I have advocated to modernize and keep up with modern tooling to no avail.


I have said it in some prev threads but the majority of my workplaces code is written by ai today, and it's not looking good.

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.


I'm trying to understand why the C suite is reaching for AI. I mean, what is driving them to force people to use it so much ?

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.


Neither do I. And we are not even at the 10x they so eagarly wanting. Nearly 3x and that's assuming every new MR matters.

I think its a combination of phycosis, detachment from the codebase, and weak critical thinking


> These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all.

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 ;).


> 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.


It's 2026. It hasn't been 10+ years


> It hasn't been 10+ years

:-?

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.


Ah, well the question you were answering spoke of 2021. It's not about not changing your practices in a decade but about LLMs. Apparently you dodged both questions by neither referring to 2021 nor to the thing that became somewhat usable in 2021 xD


>I can close an eye on using LLMs for research only.

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 you plan to be an employee at some company, you will need to use LLMs. If you plan to go self-employed, then you can avoid LLMs as long as possible. I wouldn't do that, but I'm not you.

However, I urge people that avoid LLMs entirely to question why they are being so much against a new tech. If it's because the underlying technology or something else (e.g., social problems). If it's not because of the tech, try using open models or some LLM that you find ethical. Or at least try to understand why there are this enormous push to use them without relying on social answers (only)


There are some "boring" enterprises that "lag behind" (subjective) the alleged trend. It just needs to have a sceptical independently-thinking CTO I guess. Which kind of goes against the typical people filling such roles.


In my company they give each one claude code.

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


> Im sick of this becoming middleman between my manager and the AI

All to eventually fire you if the manager can just do everything themselves, if the AI hype hold up.


IMO, its not a hype, its the new normal, cant you see how fast these LLMs in the past years advance.

Dont get me wrong, these LLM will wipe out everyone any time soon it just the matter of time.


Thus far I still am, but I'm in a very weird and atypical work situation at the moment.

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.


We have groups in our company that do not have access to LLMs yet, due to company beuracracy. Also, token usage is capped, so developers need to be strategic about their usage. This could of course all change. We are swithing from Codex to Github Copilot due to pricing (I think).


I use Codex extensively, but mostly as a sounding board for architectural questions. I'll also have it do a lot of boilerplate work, but damn, I don't get these people creating multiple Claude or Codex accounts to burn tokens all day. I still love writing code!


Yeah, as much as I can.

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.


Dow/classified projects can still be pretty old school. Our company hasn’t really done much on the AI front yet although I’m pushing hard to change that.


on the other hand cyberespionage has changed drastically


I am deeply envious that you have dodged the slop trenches and get to walk into a somewhat cleaner solution.

The rest of us have to clean up and maintain the slop and it's depressing as hell.


Defense contracting doesn't have an aversion to LLMs so much as it doesn't like doing anything that threatens the status quo. Many places sit comfortably 5-10 years behind the median of the rest of the industry or are stuck on proprietary tech stacks for arbitrary reasons.

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.


Ironic, I'm upset that I'm still writing code like it's 2016. I've been pushing hard for AI tools, and I've convinced management that it's a good idea but now they're playing "favorite company" and not actually delivering tools.

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


> it's about delivering a high quality product and no one can do that anymore without AI tools

Citation needed.


Interviews require you to code without any LLM help. 9/10 require this still. Once inside, I don’t think they write any code themselves.


I don't think this is true. The interviews I had were all impossible without AI given the time frame.


Were these take home assignments or live coding? It sounds weird to interview someone just to watching them use an AI agent.


Both - timed take home (3 hour limit) as well as in 1 hour live coding. The scope was impossible for that time be a coder whatever you are. Not sure if was enough time for raw typing.


I work at a significant computer security software vendor with 5-digits of employees. They provide AI tooling and training and encourage people to use it, but it's not like "use this or we will fire you and kill your children" like you hear from other companies. I use it a couple times a week, mostly for code review and sometimes boring boilerplate-type tasks, but it hasn't been a major overhaul in how I work. People here who obviously outsource their brain to the AI get negative reactions to that behavior.

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.


Dude, just go look for anything in Defense.

Not only are the frontier models verboten anywhere in the building[1], but any open weight model running on your laptop has to pass a pretty strict approval process. We don't have the GPUs on site to run anything that would be competitive with, say, a Claude, so any dumb crappy 7B models you got locally are not going to be taking over the coding of, say, a complex visual 3d tracking algorithm.

So if you want to code like it's 1998, jump in your Delorean and come on down to the Death Merchants.

[1] Putting anything in them remotely product-related is an insta-fire offense. Security will bring boxes to pack your things before the answer comes back.


An acquaintance of mine works in the energy sector. It’s a very conservative field, and they don’t use AI.


i've been coding for... decades. and i love programming and learning new things. unfortunately nobody wants me to do it for money, so i've given up. and since i can do nothing else i'm out of options :(


I don't use LLMs for coding aside from minor suggestions. They've also gotten far worse in quality in the past year (GitHub Copilot especially. It went from "oh this has promise" to "I could hire a 12 year old to do this better").

The gold standard remains to code things yourself.


I ended a 10 year contract when the new clownshoes CTO started hyping the slop. I would rather stare at a wall than 'manage' an 'agentic team'.


Yes, I do. I don't see an advantage to using LLMs in my main project. I do see dangers: losing the overview.

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.


I'm pretending to drink the koolaid, faking interest in agentic coding while I figure out something else to do. It's okay for personal projects but professionally, I honestly hate reviewing slop, being sent 10+ page documents full of junk that nobody has read.


Unemployed.


I do not have an answer to your original question but I do have a comment that I have realized it myself quite recently. May be the analogy is not good enough but here it goes: no one would go back to punch cards etc, we have come a long way. And GenAI is such a tool - there is no going back.


Yea, it is easier to use an LLM for search than using a conventional search engine. No one is going back to that if a non-malicious LLM is available at reasonable costs.


The real costs are externalised to society and the environment. I assume you weren’t including that in your “reasonable costs”.


They really just need to mandate that new datacenter construction uses closed loop cooling, and must provide an upfront investment sufficient to add enough carbon free energy to the grid to power it. That would, of course, make it much more expensive, but maybe it'd be enough to make investors consider whether lighting trillions of dollars on fire is really the best use of their money.


Nobody really cares about externalized costs. If they did, then cars, electricity, lithium batteries, etc wouldn't be as popular as they are.


I think that's a poor analogy. I think the better comparison is it's 50% of the quality for 20% of the cost. Is that a win? I dunno.


What kind of programming do you do? If it's enterprise programming and it's basically CRUDs all the way down, yeah, LLM are pretty good at it and you need to find a balance if you don't enjoy it anymore.

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.




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