Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
Sounds amazing. How on earth did he go from shoeing horses to learning about the internal combustion engine? Seems quite the leap that not everyone would be capable of.
Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.
Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
This happened to my grandfather (blacksmith to working on cars and motorcycles), who was illiterate. From what I gather, it was a lifetime of trial-and-error-and-keep-what-works.
Early automobiles were very simple machines. I you knew how to repair a carriage or a wagon, you were pretty close to being able to work on an early automobile. You should check them out.
Honestly I think people forget this fact. You don't have to go that far back to find vehicles that you absolutely could do anything to yourself with basic tools.
We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple. Go back to the early 70s-before and it's mostly all analog or trivial electronics.
This was the video that earned my sub. Even though it covers stuff I mostly already knew, it's done in such a way that that it breaks down the whys that may not be apparent to people without a background in this stuff.
This and the video on hybrids, are, imo important works, because they break things down in a way that disarms tribalism, and explain how it is that we got to where we are. There are very real stakes in ownership, right to repair, and freedom of movement that rest on people having a good baseline understanding of this stuff.
Even as late as the late 90s, probably into the mid 2000s for manuals. The complexity of vehicles from that era is mostly in understanding the role of the sensors (or that they even exist in the first place). Once you understand that, they go back to being pretty straightforward. I guess the exception here is probably immobilizers.
The complexity of modern vehicles comes down to software coupling between the systems, which (to my knowledge) started with automatic transmissions, and then spread to everything else. In very modern vehicles, even the sensors register with the ECU and communicate on encrypted channels.
The reason for these measures is ostensibly security and quality, but automakers don't seem to mind the fact that it also makes many repairs more difficult or impossible.
My first car was a 1986 Grand Marquis and I spent every other weekend of high school fixing something on it. What an incredible waste of time: I worked a part time job so that I could afford to keep a car running so that I could drive between school, home, and my part time job instead of riding the bus.
But it was easy to work on. My dad (not a mechanic) usually had a strong hunch about what the problem was. Lights went dim while you were driving and five minutes later it sputtered out? Alternator is dead. Flip through the manual to find a diagram of where all the bolts are, take it off, run to Auto Zone, get another one, bolt it on. By the end it was usually dark and I was finishing the job with a shop light hung under the hood.
I drove a series of beaters from the 80s and 90s and did all my own repairs until my mid 20s. Alternators, water pumps, break pads, break lines, ignition solenoids. All of it is just parts that you unbolt and bolt a new one on. When I got my first modern car (a 2008!) one look under the hood made me realize I had joined the yuppie class and would not be changing my own spark plugs anymore.
I always did my own maintenance including changing spark plugs. Then I bought a Subaru. That weird 4 cylinder has plugs facing slightly down that you either have to cut the wheel well cowl or UNMOUNT AND JACK THE MOTOR OUT OF THE ENGINE BAY to change.
My solution was to use like 11 wobble extensions and pray that I didn't drop anything. 8 hours later I changed 4 plugs and understood why it cost $250 at the dealer to have them to it. Then I gladly started paying that money.
Conversely, carriages (and other pre-automobile machines) were also surprisingly complicated. Steering mechanisms, leaf springs, brakes, and a variety of linkages including the horse harnesses themselves (which had to account for the animal's gait).
Early cars were called horseless carriages for a reason.
Car bodies were carriages for few first decades of car history. So if you can fix and maintain horse carriage - you can maintain car carriage.
Engines were simple too and designed to be maintained in a field environment with few tools. So it’s reasonable that this skill was learned, especially by mechanically inclined people.
In the late 1800s there was a cottage industry of mechanics and ironmongers selling and repairing small steam and kerosene engines used by rural mills and farms. There were horse drawn steam threshing machines. Bicycle repair shops sprang up. The Wright brothers got into the bicycle business before horseless carriages. There were many intermediate tech skills that led up to working on motorcars.
I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface. However I think it's quite unfair to reject the authors premise due to the ephemeral nature of some software. And I think it's downright arrogant to assume moving from horses to cars wasn't seriously challenging for his ancestor. But yeah, I would love to chat with the old man about what that transition looked like.
Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
> Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface.
Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
> In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
art and music for some, but personally I'm most interested in seeing where science goes. Reproducibility of experiments is gonna be first. How many experiments don't reproduce, or have unwritten biases in the papers. Room temperature semiconductors. Fusion seems actually a decade away, finally. Research into better treatments for diseases, how to help people be smarter, live their best life. There's plenty more to do now that making CRUD apps is so much easier. Maybe AI will become creative enough to not need humans for that, but it'll still need someone to drive it and choose which direction it goes.
Art and music? Ok for live performance. But recorded performance is directly in competion with genAI for revenue streams, with content used without permission for more genAI training.
It can't though. You still need to run real trials on living humans, living their lives and taking experimental drugs/procedures/interventions and running statistics on them.
AI can do everything you described except the "living out a human life" - but it can iterate on ever better simulations of that, or worse, it may reward-hack and... well, I'd rather not be the human in that story.
Do you really think humans are going to be the users? Sure for tomorrow and next month, but the clock is ticking. I got mad at our internal CS peeps the other day. They were demanding an internal tool. I was like we went through hell this summer replacing the front end so it's agent usable, just get Claude to do that. They were like oh...
Another thing is that, unlike AI, automobiles were (somewhat kinda) going to "replace horses".
The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.
Out of curiosity, what was the timeline ? Cause I'm afraid that, when you mentioned "I don't know what the other farriers" did, the answer may be "they were sent to the front and died by the 1000s".
Which starts to be my fear for the real "solution" to job displacement by AIs : people will just be sent to some far away conflict where they will transition to a career in "daffodil fertilization" :/
My father worked for the railroad as a blacksmith but he apprenticed to an old blacksmith who was a farrier before. There are still farriers to this day.
Some of us will need to move on to other things but there will probably still be a lot of farrier type jobs around.
Don’t worry about it. You’re just playing your part. The trite comparison to past successful innovations. The paragraph about the AI Revolution. The AI Inevitability Soothsaying (“Be willing to let go of the how to hold on to the why”).
The perfect HN frontpage material.
Of course I wrote the two preceding paragraphs before reading your webpage: “I am Co-founder and CTO of Tandem, an AI Assistant for SaaS apps.” Just another entrepenur with a psychological spin.
megalomanu · · focus · HN ↗
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
4ndrewl · · focus · HN ↗
justonceokay · · focus · HN ↗
ariwilson · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
ffreire · · focus · HN ↗
megalomanu · · focus · HN ↗
Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
4ndrewl · · focus · HN ↗
forshaper · · focus · HN ↗
doug_durham · · focus · HN ↗
Loughla · · focus · HN ↗
We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
ZeWaka · · focus · HN ↗
throw0101c · · focus · HN ↗
Alec of Technology Connections just posted a video on this:
* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KoeY54M5VA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KoeY54M5VA
coderenegade · · focus · HN ↗
This and the video on hybrids, are, imo important works, because they break things down in a way that disarms tribalism, and explain how it is that we got to where we are. There are very real stakes in ownership, right to repair, and freedom of movement that rest on people having a good baseline understanding of this stuff.
e_l · · focus · HN ↗
coderenegade · · focus · HN ↗
The complexity of modern vehicles comes down to software coupling between the systems, which (to my knowledge) started with automatic transmissions, and then spread to everything else. In very modern vehicles, even the sensors register with the ECU and communicate on encrypted channels.
The reason for these measures is ostensibly security and quality, but automakers don't seem to mind the fact that it also makes many repairs more difficult or impossible.
eloisius · · focus · HN ↗
But it was easy to work on. My dad (not a mechanic) usually had a strong hunch about what the problem was. Lights went dim while you were driving and five minutes later it sputtered out? Alternator is dead. Flip through the manual to find a diagram of where all the bolts are, take it off, run to Auto Zone, get another one, bolt it on. By the end it was usually dark and I was finishing the job with a shop light hung under the hood.
I drove a series of beaters from the 80s and 90s and did all my own repairs until my mid 20s. Alternators, water pumps, break pads, break lines, ignition solenoids. All of it is just parts that you unbolt and bolt a new one on. When I got my first modern car (a 2008!) one look under the hood made me realize I had joined the yuppie class and would not be changing my own spark plugs anymore.
Loughla · · focus · HN ↗
My solution was to use like 11 wobble extensions and pray that I didn't drop anything. 8 hours later I changed 4 plugs and understood why it cost $250 at the dealer to have them to it. Then I gladly started paying that money.
skew-aberration · · focus · HN ↗
trymas · · focus · HN ↗
Car bodies were carriages for few first decades of car history. So if you can fix and maintain horse carriage - you can maintain car carriage.
Engines were simple too and designed to be maintained in a field environment with few tools. So it’s reasonable that this skill was learned, especially by mechanically inclined people.
ahazred8ta · · focus · HN ↗
rtar-wiuz · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
howunfortunate · · focus · HN ↗
Please consider that this family story likely motivates OP's worldview and projects, rather than the other way around.
asd176 · · focus · HN ↗
froh · · focus · HN ↗
adamredwoods · · focus · HN ↗
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
Interesting historical read:
<a href="https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-created-automobile/" rel="nofollow">https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
j4k0bfr · · focus · HN ↗
Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
P.S. ty for the article link, will read!
dolmen · · focus · HN ↗
Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
Miraltar · · focus · HN ↗
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
dolmen · · focus · HN ↗
fifilura · · focus · HN ↗
Throwback to HN anno 2021 everyone was complaining about their bread and butter was creating CRUD apps.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
swader999 · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
swader999 · · focus · HN ↗
arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
andai · · focus · HN ↗
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (December 2025)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723
whstl · · focus · HN ↗
The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.
chantepierre · · focus · HN ↗
phtrivier · · focus · HN ↗
Which starts to be my fear for the real "solution" to job displacement by AIs : people will just be sent to some far away conflict where they will transition to a career in "daffodil fertilization" :/
pj_mukh · · focus · HN ↗
Ensorceled · · focus · HN ↗
Some of us will need to move on to other things but there will probably still be a lot of farrier type jobs around.
keybored · · focus · HN ↗
The perfect HN frontpage material.
Of course I wrote the two preceding paragraphs before reading your webpage: “I am Co-founder and CTO of Tandem, an AI Assistant for SaaS apps.” Just another entrepenur with a psychological spin.