That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY
> I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.
That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.
The hypothetical that we're 8x as productive but the work isn't as fun isn't "society becoming shittier".
We are very well paid for very cushy work. It's not good for anyone's work to get worse, but it's not a huge hit to society if a well-paid cushy job gets less cushy.
And presumably people buy our work because it's valuable to them. Multiplying that by 8 would be a pretty big benefit to society.
I don't want my job to get less fun, but I would press that button without hesitation. It would be an incredible trade for society at large.
I've seen plenty enough people try, really try, to get into software development; but they just can't do it.
So I mean... Yeah
Is software more comfortable generally than many other lines of work? Yes probably
Is it always soft and cushy? No, not at all. It is often high pressure and high stress
All I can suggest is see a doctor as soon as possible and talk to them about it
I cannot remember events, conversations, or details about important things. I have partially lost my ability to code, because I get partway through implementing a feature and forget what pieces I've done and which pieces still need to be done
I can still write it, but the quality of my work has plummeted, which is part of why I'm off on leave now
2,350 contributions in 2021
2,661 contributions in 2022
381 contributions in 2023 <--- burnout
794 contributions in 2024 <--- recovery
1,632 contributions in 2025 (so far)
I hope my recovery doesn't take that long, but if it does it does
I would rather give myself the space and time to really get better, rather than simply rush back to work and burn out again
1. 1 tablespoon of cold extracted cod liver oil EVERY MORNING
2. 30 min of running 3-4 times a week
3. 2-3 weight lifting sessions every week
4. regular walks.
5. cross train on different intellectually stimulating subjects. doing the same cognitive tasks over and over is like repetive motion on your muscles
6. regularly scheduled "fallow mind time." I set aside an 30 min to an hour everyday to just sit in a chair and let my mind wander. its not meditation. I jsut sit and let my mind drift to whatever it wants.
7. while it should be avoided, in the event that you have to crunch, RESPECT THE COOLDOWN. take downtime after. don't let your nontechnical leads talk you out of it. thinking hard for extended periods of time requires appropriate recovery.
the human brain is a complex system and while we think of our mind as abstract and immaterial, it is in reality a whole lot of physical systems that grow, change and use resources the same way any other physical system in your body does. just like muscles need to recover after a workout to get stronger, so too does your brain after extended periods of deep thinking.
But I am struggling to remember things I did not used to struggle with
Going to an event on a weekend with my wife and completely forgetting that we ran into a friend there. Not just "oh yeah I forgot we saw them", like feeling my wife is lying to me when she tells me we saw them. Texting them to ask and they agree we saw each other
These are people I trust with my life so I believe they would not gaslight me, my own memory has just failed
Many examples like this, just completely blacking out things. Not forgetting everything, but blacking out large pieces of my daily life. Even big things
Disclaimer: talk to your doctor. I don’t know if your doctor can tell you whether this is a good idea, but it might help in some countries with good medical systems.
Software devs jobs getting less cushy is no biggie. We can afford to amp up the efficiency. Teachers jobs got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. Doctors jobs got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. Even waiters/ check-out staff, stockists jobs at restaurants, groceries and AMZ got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. at least not when you need to call someone for help.
These things are not as disconnected as they seem. Businesses are in fact made up of people.
1. Efficiency measures as written to benchmark this coupling with economic productivity overall
2. Monetary assessments of value in the context of businesses spending money corresponding with social value
3. The gains of economic productivity being distributed across society to any degree, or the effect of this disparity itself being negligible
4. The negative externalities of these processes scaling less quickly than whatever we're measuring in our productivity metric
5. Aforementioned externalities being able to scale to even a lesser degree in lockstep with productivity without crashing all of the above, if not causing even more catastrophic outcomes
I have very little faith in any of these assumptions
You're right in general, but I don't think that'll save you/us from OP's statement. This is simple economic incentives at play. If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). The "from my cold dead hands" hand-coding crowd may be right, but they're a transitional historical footnote. Coding was always blue-collar white-collar work. No-one outside of coders will weep for what was lost.
I suspect we'll find that the amount of technical debt and loss of institutional knowledge incured by misuse of these tools was initially underappreciated.
I don't doubt that the industry will be transformed, but that doesn't mean that these tools are a panacea.
I also specifically used the term "misuse" to significantly weaken my claim. I mean only to say that the risks and downsides are often poorly understood, not that there are no good uses.
On the scale I’ve been doing this (20 years), that hasn’t been the case.
Rails was massively more efficient for what 90% of companies where building. But it never had anywhere near a 90% market share.
It doesn’t take 1000 engineers to build CRUD apps, but companies are driven to grow by forces other than pure market efficiency.
There are still plenty of people using simple text editors when full IDEs have offered measurable productivity boosts for decades.
>(as we’re seeing)
I work at a big tech company. Productivity per person hasn’t noticeably increased. The speed that we ship hasn’t noticeably increased. All that’s happening is an economic downturn.
But AI seems to be different in that it claims to replace programmers, instead of augment them. Yes, higher productivity means you don't have to hire as many people, but with AI tools there's specifically the promise that you can get rid of a bunch of your developers, and regardless of truth, clueless execs buy the marketing.
Stupid MBAs at big companies see this as a cost reduction - so regardless of the utility of AI code-generation tools (which may be high!), or of the fact that there are many other ways to get productivity benefits, they'll still try to deploy these systems everywhere.
That's my projection, at least. I'd love to be wrong.
But no matter how hard cost cutters wanted to, they were never able to actually reduce the total number of devs outside of major economic downturns.
This feels like kicking someone when they’re down! Given the current state of corporate and political America, it doesn’t look likely there will be any pressure for anything but enshittification to me. Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help. What mechanism do you see for not giving up to actually change the experience of people in 10 ish years time?
That isn't what they said tho. They said you have to do something, not that you should just be happy. Doing something can involve things that historically had a big impact in improving working conditions, like collective action and forming unions.
The opposite advice would be: "Everything's fucked, nothing you can do will change it, so just give up." Needless to say that is bad advice unless you are a targeted individual in a murderous regime or similar.
Correct. But it becoming shittier is the strong default, with forces that you constantly have to fight against.
And the reason is very simple: Someone profits from it being shittier and they have a lot of patience and resources.
Realizing that attitude in myself at times has given me so much more peace of mind. Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible.
Not to mention the times where in the end I spend a lot of time and energy in trying to be faster only to end up with this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/
As far as LLM use goes, I don't need moar velocity! so I don't try to min max my agentic workflow just to squeeze out X amount more lines code.
In fact, I don't really work with agentic workflows to begin with. I more or less still use LLMs as tools external to the process. Using them as interactive rubber duckies. Things like deciphering spaghetti code, do a sanity check on code I wrote (and being very critical of the suggestions they come up with), getting a quick jump start on stuff I haven't used again (how do I get started with X of Y again?), that sort of stuff.
Using LLMs in the IDE and other agentic use is something I have worked with. But to me it falls under what I call "lazy use" where you are further and further removed from the creation of code, the reasoning behind it, etc. I know it is a highly popular approach with many people on HN. But in my experience, it is an approach that makes skills of experienced developers atrophy and makes sure junior developers are less likely to pick them up. Making both overly reliant on tools that have been shown to be less than reliable when the output isn't properly reviewed.
I get the firm feeling that velocity crowd works in environments where they are judged by the amount of tickets closed. Basically "feature complete, test green, merged, move on!". In that context, it isn't really "important" that the tests that are green are also refactored by the thing itself, just that they are green. It is a symptom of a corporate environment where the focus is on these "productivity" metrics. From that perspective I can fully see the appeal for LLM heavy workflows as they most certainly will have an impact on metrics like "tickets closed" or "lines of code written".
It does when you are competing for getting and keeping employment opportunities.
If you're a salaried or hourly employee, you aren't paid for your output, you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity.
If you complete all your work in an hour... you still owe seven hours based on the expectations of your employment agreement, in order to earn your salary and benefits.
If you'd rather work in an output based capacity, you'll want to move to running your own contacting business in a fixed-bid type capacity.
There's legal distinctions between part time and full time employment. Hence, you are expected to put in a minimum number of hours. However, there's nothing to say that the minimum expectation is the minimum for classification for full time employment.
If AI lets you get the job done in 1 hour when you otherwise would have worked overtime, you're still technically being paid to work more than that one hour, and I don't know of any employer that'll pay you to do nothing.
My company has been preparing for this for a while now, I guess, as my backlog clearly has years' worth of work in it and positions of people who have left the org remain unfilled. My colleagues at other companies are in a similar situation. Considering round after round of layoffs, if I got ahead a little bit and found that I had nothing else to do, I'd be worried for my job.
Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable
Yes, I agree, but the deck is usually stacked against the worker, especially in America. I doubt this will be the issue that promotes any sort of collectivism.
If the structures and systems that are in-place only facilitate life getting more difficult in some way, then it probably will, unless it doesn't.
Housing getting nearly unownable is a symptom of that. Climate change is another.
That's stupid and detrimental to your mental health.
You do it in an hour, spend maybe 1-2 hours to make it even better and prettier and then relax. Do all that menial shit you've got lined up anyway.
I wish that the hype crowd would do that. It would make a for a much more enjoyable and sane experience on platforms like this. It's extremely difficult to have actual conversations subjects when there are crowds of fans involved who don't want to hear anything negative.
Yes, I also do realize there are people completely on the other side as well. But to honest, I can see why they are annoyed by the fan crowd.
Exactly, IME the hype crowd is really the worst at this. They will spend 8h doing 8 different 1h tries at getting the right context for the LLM and then claim they did it in 1h.
They claim to be faster than they are. There's a lot of mechanical turking going about as soon as you ask a few probing questions.
Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.
If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(s). After all, for business leader it's the output that matters, not the code.
For 20+ years business leaders have been eager to shed the high overhead of developers via any means necessary while ignoring their most expensive employees' input. Anyone remember Dilbert? It was funny as a kid, and is now tragic in its timeless accuracy a generation later.
An earlier iteration of your reply said "Is that really winning?" The answer is no. I don't think any class of SE end up a winner here.
Maybe. I'm seeing the opposite - yes, the big ships take time to turn, but with the rise of ransomware and increasing privacy regulation around the world, companies are putting more and more emphasis on quality and avoiding incidents.
That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!
>In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labour power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and the wages paid to him for the labour.
Less often discussed is Marx's view of social alienation in this context: i.e., workers used to take pride in who they are based on their occupation. 'I am the best blacksmith in town.' Automation destroyed that for workers, and it'll come for you/us, too.
Low quality software kills people.
Both will stay manual / require high level of review they're not what's being disrupted (at-least in near term) - it's the rest.
What was automated was the production of raw cloth.
This phenomenon is a general one… chainsaws vs hand saws, bread slicers vs hand slicing, mechanical harvesters vs manual harvesting, etc.
A large enough GDPR or SOX violation is the boogeyman that CEO's see in their nightmares.
AI slop code doesn't even work beyond toy examples.
The machines we’re talking about made raw cloth not clothing and it was actually higher quality in many respects because of accuracy and repeatability.
Almost all clothing is still made by hand one piece at a time with sewing machines still very manually operated.
“…the output of power looms was certainly greater than that of the handlooms, but the handloom weavers produced higher quality cloths with greater profit margins.” [1]
The same can be said about machines like the water frame. It was great at spinning coarse thread, but for high quality/luxury textile (ie. fine fabric), skilled (human) spinners did a much better job. You can read the book Blood in the Machine for even more context.
If your goal is to make 1000 of the exact same dress, having a completely consistent raw material is synonymous with high quality.
It’s not fair to say that machines produced some kind of inferior imitation of the handmade product, that only won through sheer speed and cost to manufacture.
When it is eventually made, though… it’s either aligned or we’re in trouble. Job cushiness will be P2 or P3 in a world where a computer can do everything economically viable better than any human.
They are brains. I think it's on you to prove they're the same, rather than assuming they're the same and then demanding proof they aren't!
But in fairness to human devs, most are still writing software that is leagues better than the dog shit AI is producing right now
Thing is though, many people don't know how to do that (user stories / acceptance criteria) properly, and it's been up to software developers to poke holes and fill in the blanks that the writer didn't think about.
If the SWE can finish his work faster, 8x faster in this case, then backlogs will also be pushed to complete 8x faster by the project manager. If there are no backlogs, new features will be required at 8x faster / more by sales team / clients. If no new features are needed, pressures will be made until costs are 8x lower by finance. If there are no legal, moral, competitive, or physical constraints, the process should continue until either there’s only a single dev working on all his available time, or less time but for considerably less salary.
This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.
It's not really about excitement or enjoyment of work.
It's the fear about the __8x output__ being considered as __8x productivity__.
The increase in `output/productivity` factor has various negative implications. I would not say everything out loud. But the wise can read between the lines.
Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.
I'm enjoying exactly what the author describes, so it's different strokes for different folks.
I always found the "code monkey" aspect of software development utterly boring and tedious, and have spent a lot of my career automating that away with various kinds of code generators, DSLs, and so on. \
Using an LLM as a general-purpose automated code monkey is a near-ideal scenario for me, and I enjoy the work more. It's especially useful for languages like Go or Java where repetitive boilerplate is endemic.
I also find it helps with procrastination, because I can just ask an LLM to start something for me and get over the initial hump.
> whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.
This is completely up to the people using it.
This is what happens with big technological advancements. Technology that enables productivity won’t free people time, but only set higher expectations of getting more work done in a day.
I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.
* setting aside whether this is currently possible, or whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.