I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."
and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.
It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.
I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).
https://blog.stuartspence.ca/introducing-asteria.html
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5482440/Asteria_4X/?beta=...
To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.
To pile on, here's mine: https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra
It is a robust, reliable cache of apt packages, with the additional goal of still being able to serve packages from the cache even when the upstream is down. This was started shortly after that DDoS of Canonical this past year. We've run apt-cacher-ng and apt-cacher over the last dozen years, but (a) it requires hand-holding about once a month and (b) it did absolutely nothing for us when Canonical was under DDoS.
I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop", but I've had 200-ish machines pulling from it for 6 months and it has worked way better than apt-cacher-ng.
I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects, while dehumanizing the 100 hours of my time I've put into it. I fear we're running the very real risk of both sides losing: the people trying to thoughtfully create with AI losing because of the AI, and the people avoiding AI losing because they can't keep pace.
AI has essentially stolen my career from me. I _liked_ having to solve complicated problems with software, I enjoyed having to get into the nitty gritty to get things done. I never really cared that much about the actual business problems I was solving, so moving up a layer of abstraction to be some sort of bastardized product manager/architect does not scratch the same itch.
OTOH, for solving problems I care about, AI has been a god send. I can achieve things that I would have never had the time for.
> If anything, it should make me more optimistic, not less. If you have an idea, you can turn it into product within 30 minutes, no matter how complicated it is.
There is no product in that anymore because someone else could copy your product in the same time.
Cancer deaths are going to sky rocket before this is all over.
I guess my wording was really bad. The point I was trying badly to make: I wasn't thinking about cell-level stuff, but rather human-level observations, experiments, etc. and these are not possible in a lab but only out in the "real world." I don't see AI running anything on that level.
edit: that would be more like medicine, not bio-science
The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
My positive feelings about AI are marginal; my feelings about its performance and the power of the people who scheme to control it are very mixed. My negative feelings about the whining of the most coddled profession on the planet outside of finance are intense.
The problem is that making CRUD apps is not creative, and even if AI plateaus at mediocre, it will still replace a Rails monkey. If you are creative, AI has opened up a world of possibility and productivity, and you painfully feel the limitations and the stupidity of the current level of LLMs; but if you're a mechanic, it's over - I'm pretty sure that was the keynote at the last Rails con. Sorry. Hope you didn't spend all of your massive incomes on toys and rent.
Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.
A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.
But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.
its a tribalism problem, but one of trying to uphold the current tribe system while theres a pretty obvious new tribe system replacing it
AI has taken that security away from me
I'm sorry for your loss, but welcome also to the real world. You had it better than most for a long while.
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
I don't see why I should care about this any more than I cared about "somebody I don't like could read my code and learn from it" in the past. The frontier labs can generate or buy all the training data they need; not releasing your app isn't going to hurt them in the slightest.
I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.
I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
Big solo projects exist, they're just not coming out as frequently because of, uh, how time works
Don't we see this already a lot? I feel like people constantly say this exact same words.
Now I must pay for codex/claude, and that money goes to billionaires psychopaths. So that sucks as you can imagine
Which talk of his gave this impression?
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
why are you here if you dont enjoy the solving of problems first and foremost?
If you can make it solo with an LLM then someone else with an LLM can copy it immediately
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?
I was a fantastic IC and built really amazing software. I'm an even better AI-empowered engineer.
The old era is dead. The new one is exciting.
Employers previously hired you because cheaper alternatives such as offshoring were impractical…
Now the AI is cheaper, faster, and better than domestic labor and offshoring while still hosted domestically…
Some will feel one doesn’t need an experienced rockstar to babysit an AI…
In about an hour I just solved about 80hrs worth of personal coding/debugging with a portion of a $20/month Claude subscription… Frankly it makes all my knowledge and experience feel kinda worthless… I only gave it a few sentences…