It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
> On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
>You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
> Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
> "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong.
This is a profoundly bad faith argument. Of course an argument is “obviously wrong” if you straw man it.
Your parent comment didn’t say that a single person has to understand the whole system, just that you have to understand the part you’re responsible for (which should be obvious).
The way I see it LLMs are accelerating trends that have been at play for a decade or two now.
I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.
My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.
I do not think you're going to get your wish.
Software engineering as we knew it is not coming back, except maybe for very niche fields and your own crafting.
Many other engineering fields have experienced this change long ago, where the majority of the "craft" is done by algorithms. Think chip design, aerospace, automotive, structural engineering, material design.
Their engineering is now focused on higher level design (and even that, less in some cases), and verification.
Programmers are not a special species, immune from this trend. Heck, we are the ones who did it to the other fields, and so it is quite amusing that we're not crying when it is our turn.
I think the people who are into it are the people who before AI would throw up a pull request that was complete shit, expect everyone else to tell them what to fix, and somehow still keep their job.
If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.
AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.
The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.
I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.
The enthusiasts are founders, executives and investors who don’t actually have to use AI to build products and therefore have a somewhat distant opinion about its real capabilities but will capture all gains from AI. They only build prototypes and rough drafts and don’t understand that AI makes the first 80% easier and the last 20% harder, and makes maintainability a nightmare where a codebase that’s gone through vibe coding for 3 months is like the equivalent of a 10 year old legacy codebase.
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
I am both. I am shipping multiple working projects per week in my hobby. It is liberating to have my own virtual dev team.
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
Because it writes garbage and I would like to understand how something actually works instead of deferring my brain to a machine? Might as well live in an iron lung.
Similar here. At home, I have a hobby, I know what I want to do, and the AI allows me to achieve it much faster.
At work, everything is chaotic, the people who make the key decisions do not understand their consequences, and the AI allows this chaos to happen much faster. On top of that, meaningless restrictions, for example only the managers are allowed to use the AI to search for information on SharePoint, the developers are only allowed to use it inside of their IDEs.
Ironically, it would be possible to use the AI to do things much better in my company. For example, there is a key component that is full of bugs, it would be much better to throw it away and vibecode a replacement in one week. But that's not going to happen, because someone very important in the company management has approved the purchase of that component. So instead, the remaining parts of the system must be tweaked to accommodate for its bugs... these days with the help of AI. It does not help that AI writes code, if humans make spaghetti architecture.
I am wondering how many devs are putting time bombs in code with AI's help. If I was at the top of the corp pyramid, I'd tell the devs to fix up all bugs and let go everyone except for a skeleton crew. Boom, profit. I mean, what is there left to build? A better Jira? /s
I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
I'm not so sure, I love tinkering but mostly see the code as a means to an end.
AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.
It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.
The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
Tinkering is more or less synonymous with dabbling, which is used more these days. Synonyms with tinkerer would be amateur, hobbiest, dabbler. There’s definitely an implied interest in how things work, but also strongly implies that one is not serious about what they’re doing.
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
I agree artisan can be a bit pretentious, but calling someone an artisan != calling someone pretentious, whereas calling someone a craftsman (to some people) == calling someone blue collar, someone who works in the crafts/went to craft school.
Since there is an entire AI community[0], claiming 135,000 members, that labels themselves 'tinkerers', any pejorative meaning in tinkerer is long gone. Probably in the same way as 'hacker' was once a rather pejorative term to the general public.
The definition of tinkerer is “An unskilled person who tries to fix or mend”. Someone making a slack channel with a diminuative moniker does not change the meaning of the word.
You would not want a surgeon who says that they’ve tinkered around with surgery. You would not want a pilot who says they’re tinkered around with piloting.
Synonyms are quite literally beginner; dilettante; novice; pretender; uninitiate.
I am not challenging the definition, only your "pejorative" connotation, which is simply incorrect. Everyone is a beginner at some point. Does that make "beginner" pejorative?
Depends. If you’re using is disparagingly, then yes, it is a pejorative.
For example from the original analogy, if you told an entrepreneur that because they didn’t use AI, they were not an entrepreneur, but instead “unskilled” or a “beginner”, that would be disparaging; pejorative.
I disagree hard.
I am a tinkerer wannabe entrepreneur and I'm having the time of my life.
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing...
But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
> I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent
I do chat with the web interfaces of LLMs quite a bit as my workflow. I’m always baffled by how rarely it arrives at the correct solution.
I pose a question with code snippets, it gives me some incorrect answer. I pose a better question, and it gives me another wrong answer. Wash rinse repeat several times; not until the LLM gets the right answer, but until I pose the question specific enough that I can answer it myself.
I do find this loop of question refinement quite beneficial, but man it makes me terrified of vibe coded applications. 9/10 times the LLM doesn’t even get in the ballpark of the problem, let alone the solution.
Not only that, but even when you get the LLM to give you the right answer, if you ask it to turn that answer into actual code committed to your repo, it usually destroys something else in the process.
I think there is a middle ground too. Well organised Engineering and Product teams using AI efficiently whilst actually talking together and making decisions. Neither AI zealots, nor doom and gloom.
The dichotomy was inevitable. So-called AI offers to alleviate the requirement for programming competance. Hence it divides people into the incompetant, which it empowers, and the competants, which it disempowers.
NichoPaolucci · · focus · HN ↗
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
kypro · · focus · HN ↗
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
koolba · · focus · HN ↗
That is the best thing I’ve read on this topic in a while.
chrisjj · · focus · HN ↗
... or never started caring about comprehension. In which case you are primary audience for the con trick of so-called AI.
tacon · · focus · HN ↗
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
skydhash · · focus · HN ↗
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
latexr · · focus · HN ↗
This is a profoundly bad faith argument. Of course an argument is “obviously wrong” if you straw man it.
Your parent comment didn’t say that a single person has to understand the whole system, just that you have to understand the part you’re responsible for (which should be obvious).
huurtehoog · · focus · HN ↗
I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.
My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.
munksbeer · · focus · HN ↗
Software engineering as we knew it is not coming back, except maybe for very niche fields and your own crafting.
Many other engineering fields have experienced this change long ago, where the majority of the "craft" is done by algorithms. Think chip design, aerospace, automotive, structural engineering, material design.
Their engineering is now focused on higher level design (and even that, less in some cases), and verification.
Programmers are not a special species, immune from this trend. Heck, we are the ones who did it to the other fields, and so it is quite amusing that we're not crying when it is our turn.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
i_love_retros · · focus · HN ↗
bob1029 · · focus · HN ↗
If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.
AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.
The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.
I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.
an0malous · · focus · HN ↗
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
snarfy · · focus · HN ↗
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
72deluxe · · focus · HN ↗
snarfy · · focus · HN ↗
someguynamedq · · focus · HN ↗
72deluxe · · focus · HN ↗
Viliam1234 · · focus · HN ↗
At work, everything is chaotic, the people who make the key decisions do not understand their consequences, and the AI allows this chaos to happen much faster. On top of that, meaningless restrictions, for example only the managers are allowed to use the AI to search for information on SharePoint, the developers are only allowed to use it inside of their IDEs.
Ironically, it would be possible to use the AI to do things much better in my company. For example, there is a key component that is full of bugs, it would be much better to throw it away and vibecode a replacement in one week. But that's not going to happen, because someone very important in the company management has approved the purchase of that component. So instead, the remaining parts of the system must be tweaked to accommodate for its bugs... these days with the help of AI. It does not help that AI writes code, if humans make spaghetti architecture.
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗
dmantis · · focus · HN ↗
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
sampullman · · focus · HN ↗
AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.
It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
dmantis · · focus · HN ↗
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
Izkata · · focus · HN ↗
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
someguynamedq · · focus · HN ↗
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
judahmeek · · focus · HN ↗
tacon · · focus · HN ↗
[0] <a href="https://aitinkerers.org/" rel="nofollow">https://aitinkerers.org/
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
You would not want a surgeon who says that they’ve tinkered around with surgery. You would not want a pilot who says they’re tinkered around with piloting.
Synonyms are quite literally beginner; dilettante; novice; pretender; uninitiate.
tacon · · focus · HN ↗
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
For example from the original analogy, if you told an entrepreneur that because they didn’t use AI, they were not an entrepreneur, but instead “unskilled” or a “beginner”, that would be disparaging; pejorative.
Gud · · focus · HN ↗
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing... But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
kevinfiol · · focus · HN ↗
wilkystyle · · focus · HN ↗
Yoric · · focus · HN ↗
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
beej71 · · focus · HN ↗
Yoric · · focus · HN ↗
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
I do chat with the web interfaces of LLMs quite a bit as my workflow. I’m always baffled by how rarely it arrives at the correct solution.
I pose a question with code snippets, it gives me some incorrect answer. I pose a better question, and it gives me another wrong answer. Wash rinse repeat several times; not until the LLM gets the right answer, but until I pose the question specific enough that I can answer it myself.
I do find this loop of question refinement quite beneficial, but man it makes me terrified of vibe coded applications. 9/10 times the LLM doesn’t even get in the ballpark of the problem, let alone the solution.
Yoric · · focus · HN ↗
_usefulcat · · focus · HN ↗
chrisjj · · focus · HN ↗
The real tragedy is the offer is false.
CaptWillard · · focus · HN ↗