Thread

1. alkonaut · 1785999287 · focus · HN ↗

   Programming has five phases effectively:

   1) You figure out what problem to solve.

   2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem.

   3) You actually implement the solution.

   4) You see the solution work, for yourself.

   5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.

   If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.

   The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.

   The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.

   If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.

   1. shiomiru · 1786005924 · focus · HN ↗

      There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work.

      Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").

      So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.

      1. Tade0 · 1786019237 · focus · HN ↗

         I'm not concerned. Never in my life have I experienced stakeholders just going "hmm, yes - this is enough software for our purposes - we won't be needing your services any more".

         There's always another feature that can be implemented or a new problem to be solved. Tools only ever accelerated the pace at which we were able to follow this insatiable hunger for more software.

         Right now people are getting fired left and right because all the money that used to be spent on staff now goes to build more data centers and also because cutting corporate expenses is in vogue now.

         This too shall pass and with demographics as they are and young people getting discouraged from pursuing this field I believe long term my position is safe.

         Also a huge chunk of what AI company CEOs say is just pure bullshit that they only say because they need that sweet, sweet investor money. Bullshit writes a check that eventually must be cashed.

         1. barbazoo · 1786025771 · focus · HN ↗

            I can imagine that this will lead to an explosion in software where we didn't see software before. Much smaller business now have the ability to build something themselves, not with a team of highly paid software developers but a single programmer maune.

            Big business is going to struggle with building software for a while. Writing code is often not the hard part there already, coordination, larger understanding of the system is I think.

            1. Tade0 · 1786044808 · focus · HN ↗

               My cowork buddy is living this reality - he's an independent analyst and previously he needed to shell out significant cash to have certain scripts (largely scrapers, social media API integration etc.) done, now it's all just a prompt away.
         2. stronglikedan · 1786030119 · focus · HN ↗

            > Right now people are getting fired left and right

            FWIW, it's just a few large companies laying off large groups, not so much people getting fired left and right at a lot of companies. What is happening at a lot of companies is that they aren't hiring juniors, because, why would you when LLMs are cheaper and fill that role perfectly (if you actually treat them like juniors).

         3. crooked-v · 1786038355 · focus · HN ↗

            Also, give it another couple of years and there's going to be a lot of work for any moderately experienced developer fixing broken slopcode hitting the hard wall of bad design.

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