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. pigpop · 1786011717 · focus · HN ↗

         Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.

         1. shiomiru · 1786014231 · focus · HN ↗

            I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well.

            (I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)

            1. ModernMech · 1786019368 · focus · HN ↗

               Being a good programmer gives you special social status amongst people who value programming. You only have to look at how people talk about others as slop coders and seek to expand their coding reputations. Those people are the most threatened by AI because of how it implicates their carefully crafted personas as coding gurus and keepers of knowledge.

               1. SoftTalker · 1786029366 · focus · HN ↗

                  It also gives you a special social status amongst people who do not understand programming: nobody wants to talk to you, at least not about your job.

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