The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.
> The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems.
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
There is nothing wrong with practicing craft, but when craft starts to matter more than vision/ambition (as it has for many engineers, even very good ones) there is going to be resistance to any method that de-emphasizes craft and emphasizes vision.
Even things like Ruby on Rails and node.js (in their early days) irritated some software crafspeople for the same reason, the tools felt like the happy path was somehow a mediocre one that was willfully ignorant of craft.
Suddenly, agentic coding has seemed to remove much of the craft from software engineering, and those who have been showing up every day celebrating craft are feeling it like a gut punch.
This is illusory bc craft still matters -- rust is a superb example of how craft matters more than ever in an agentic world, fwiw.
No, this isn’t what you said. You said that those resistant only view this as a job and don’t love solving problems - this is a completely ridiculous opinion/propaganda.
The world isn’t so black and white. It’s possible to be excited about what AI can help accelerate and simultaneously be resistant to the idea that 100% of software engineering (from premise -> shipped and maintained) can and should be offloaded purely to AI. And more importantly, AI reminds me a lot of leverage - it amplifies the good, but possibly more importantly it really amplifies the bad.
Software engineering is much more than just writing code.
resters · · focus · HN ↗
ar_lan · · focus · HN ↗
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
resters · · focus · HN ↗
There is nothing wrong with practicing craft, but when craft starts to matter more than vision/ambition (as it has for many engineers, even very good ones) there is going to be resistance to any method that de-emphasizes craft and emphasizes vision.
Even things like Ruby on Rails and node.js (in their early days) irritated some software crafspeople for the same reason, the tools felt like the happy path was somehow a mediocre one that was willfully ignorant of craft.
Suddenly, agentic coding has seemed to remove much of the craft from software engineering, and those who have been showing up every day celebrating craft are feeling it like a gut punch.
This is illusory bc craft still matters -- rust is a superb example of how craft matters more than ever in an agentic world, fwiw.
ar_lan · · focus · HN ↗
The world isn’t so black and white. It’s possible to be excited about what AI can help accelerate and simultaneously be resistant to the idea that 100% of software engineering (from premise -> shipped and maintained) can and should be offloaded purely to AI. And more importantly, AI reminds me a lot of leverage - it amplifies the good, but possibly more importantly it really amplifies the bad.
Software engineering is much more than just writing code.