kody

I agree. It really is not a difficult “skill” to learn. It took me probably 4 days to configure agents to break down requirements, write tests, write code, open PRs, review and merge PRs. Learned how to use skills, MCP, AGENTS.md. It is really not complicated. It’s just…writing well. Knowing how to decompose problems. Trying out different tools. I also learn new things every day but I sincerely do not think I would be X times more effective with these tools had I started a year ago.

at which point they will learn to write markdown files too.

Mix in exhaustion from previous hype cycles (NFTs?) and folks pushing the narrative that if you currently write any code manually, you’re obsolete and it’s hard to not want to push back negatively. Even if you find the tech interesting/useful.

It’s a tricky philosophy to put into practice. I have oscillated between this approach (“owning” the effort) and “owning” the outcome. I have found that taking ownership of the outcome leads to better results because I have a personal stake in the outcome and I tend to think through the problem more deeply, but I am almost always left feeling more stressed and “empty” when the work is finished. When I focus on doing the best I can and let go of the outcome, the end result is almost always subpar which leaves me feeling frustrated, because I know it could have been better had I taken on more responsibility.

Coaxed into dead-end architecture is the exact issue I have had when trying agentic coding. I find that I have the greatest success when I plan everything out and document the implementation plan as precisely as possible before handing it off to the agent. At which point, the hard part is already done. Generating the code was not really the bottleneck.

Using LLMs to generate documentation for the code that I write, explaining data sheets to me, and writing boilerplate code does save me a lot of time, though.

I second Code Complete.

The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete were integral on my first job.

Oxide is another that comes to mind.

> I’m no longer an artisan enjoying the journey of creating

me the first time my boss forced me to unit test my code

...

The best thing you can do is listen to your gut and try to act as rationally as you can.

Talk with trusted mentors if you've got them. Don't listen to me and for the love of god don't listen to people on HN or reddit or Youtube or any other social media.

Nobody knows what they're talking about and they certainly don't know how it'll impact you.

If somebody is making you feel afraid, left behind/out, inferior -- they're trying to sell you shit. Don't listen to the bullies and con artists.

You're entitled to your opinion. If you think AI output is crap, it's crap. Don't be pressured to conform. This is supposed to be hackernews after all. There are plenty of companies using java 8 today. You won't be unhireable.

I appreciate your reply. My tone was a little dismissive; I'm currently deep deep in the trenches trying to unwind a tremendous amount of LLM slop in my team's codebase so I'm a little sensitive.

I use Claude every day. It is definitely impressive, but in my experience only marginally more impressive than ChatGPT was a few years ago. It hallucinates less and compiles more reliably, but still produces really poor designs. It really is an overconfident junior developer.

The real risk, and what I am seeing daily, is colleagues falling for the "if you aren't using Cursor you're going to be left behind" FUD. So they learn Cursor, discover that it's an easy way to close tickets without using your brain, and end up polluting the codebase with very questionable designs.

It's 60-80% as good as Stack Overflow copy-pasting programmers, sure, but those programmers were already providing questionable value.

It's nowhere near as good as someone actually building and maintaining systems. It's barely able to vomit out an MVP and it's almost never capable of making a meaningful change to that MVP.

If your experiences have been different that's fine, but in my day job I am spending more and more time just fixing crappy LLM code produced and merged by STAFF engineers. I really don't see that changing any time soon.

We use C for embedded products at work. My gut feeling is that Rust or Zig would require way too much time investment to learn and use properly, then you'd still have to deal with interop problems.

No. I use AI as a fast but stupid research assistant. It aggregates information to point me in the right direction but I don't trust it at face value. I tried copilot for the first time last week and found it useful for writing bash boilerplate but not much else.

Your coworker could download it, record a screencap, and IM you the URL very easily, with a Fisher Price UI. I'm not surprised it took off.

Wake up to my kid scream whispering at my baby to stop kicking me in the throat, change diapers make coffee and eggs, read a couple headlines about how it's the worst time in history to be alive, make lunches clean up breakfast and leave for work late to attend the daily all company hour long standup.

In all seriousness, sans young baby the most productive time of my life has been fitting exercise/side project time in between 4:30-6am. I made some real gains during that time and plan to get back into that routine once sleep isn't so rare.

Painfully accurate. Nothing is worse for me creatively when the work environment is paranoid, ass covering, disinterested in the work.

Funny enough I had an interview today with a dynamic programming whiteboard problem. I feel like if I hadn't been putting in my leetcode hours I would have totally bombed

I'm really curious, how do you factor in time to learn ("up skill")?

I'm a self taught dev with 2 young kids. I've always had a healthy approach to work, but now I'm feeling quite a lot of pressure to learn new things on my own time, whether to make sure I'm prepared for the interview circuit if I get laid off, or to patch my skills that are needed at work.

I'm starting to feel burnout creep in, getting an hour of study in the morning, taking care of family, and then working 8 hours.

I appreciate your insight.

I would kill for code-adjacent docs right now.

We're a documentation-heavy org and having to open Confluence, find the right root page, drill down to where I need to be, and deal with ~1s page loads drives me nuts.

USA, months of no responses, now have two interviews this Friday. C++ embedded dev. So in my world it's picking up a little bit.

Very cool. I appreciate the breakdown of how you built this.

Funny, after 6 years in startups I'm looking for something along the lines of "boring Java programmer for a bank". I'm tired of changing the world, man.

Yeah, on principle I don't support banning a media channel like this. But an immature part of me wants the ban to be enforced so I don't have to deal with insufferable personalities of TikTok addicts any more.

Assuming that includes health insurance, same here.

My students LOVED IXL. I couldn't believe when I found out the kids kept using IXL after school and on weekends to compete with each other.

Flask + Svelte is very accessible. When my Middle School students wanted to "build an app" I would roll up a boilerplate with Flask, Svelte, and SQLite on Replit (would not recommend anymore - Replit has jumped the shark) and they were able to become very productive very quickly.

EDIT: this was after 1-2 months of intro Python and JavaScript, so they weren't going in blind but also didn't have to learn, say, React. If you know some Python, you can use Flask. If you know some JS, you can use Svelte.

I opened to project to take a look at the source code, which I would not have done if the project were written in, say, C.

Get a job, get very very good at doing your job, then find a new job right before you start to feel like you're coasting.

Don't worry too much about optimizing for the best company, niche, tech stack, whatever. Focus on getting a breadth of knowledge, learning how businesses operate and how you contribute to their profit centers (great advice here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...), how to work well with people, and various approaches to software design.

Keep an open mind (fight overzealousness in your opinions) and approach your work with a positive attitude and you will see all kinds of opportunities to specialize present themselves. Then, your hardest decision will be which specialization creates the most leverage for you.

Don't get bogged down by AI, mass layoffs, or any of the other doomsaying. If you're made to feel fearful, it's because someone is trying to profit off you.

I am a self-taught developer so take all my advice with a grain of salt ;)

$50 to skin my buddy's band's MySpace page. $200 for an actor friend's portfolio website shortly thereafter.

I am in a senior role, previously full-stack developer, tech director, and now embedded software.