I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
Because there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood.
Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus.
Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
You're not the carpenter though, the code you wrote can rarely do things on its own, you need a toolchain or an interpreter, or something to run it with. Toolchains use your code as rough reference, turning you into a designer/architect. I don't endorse it when people fully offload development to LLMs, that's lazy and irresponsible, but how I see most devs use it (not the loud minority) it's just another tool in the arsenal. If it lets you skip the annoying steps and focus on the logic - excellent, great, I'm not great at Java, i don't know all of its built in APIs, I can ask an LLM that I need this and this API to communicate with C++ layer, perform the following logic, output the following logs, after which I can audit and validate the code to the best of my ability. Is that such a bad thing? Did a caveman with a stick reject the hammer and the axe?
spike021 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
I'd call that a victory.
kode-targz · · focus · HN ↗
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood. Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus. Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
yaro330 · · focus · HN ↗