> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.
Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities.
This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact.
We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs.
There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.
"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs"
This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about.
Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack?
That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.
I'm firmly in the “don't want to use it; if you want to, feel free, but stop nagging me to” camp.
Oh, and the “I'm not accepting 'the AI did it' as an excuse for failures” camp. Just like outsourcing to other humans: you chose the tool(s), you are responsible for verifying the output.
I got into programming and kicking infrastructure because I'm the sort of sad git who likes the details, and I'm not about to let some automaton steal my fun and turn me into its glorified QA service!
I'd rather go serve tables or stack shelves, heck I've been saying I need a good long sabbatical from tech for a few years now… And before people chime in with “but that would mean dropping back to minimum wage”: if LLMs mean almost everybody can program, then programming will pretty soon be a minimum wage job anyway, and I'll just be choosing how I earn that minimum (and perhaps reclaiming tinkering with tech as the hobby it was when I was far younger).
Now this, putting aside my thoughts above, i find a compelling argument. You just don’t want to. I think that should go along with a reasonable understanding of what a person is choosing to not use, but I’ll presume you have that.
Then? Sure, the frustrating part is to see someone making that choice tell other people that theirs is invalid, especially when we don’t know what the scene will look like when the dust settles.
There’s no reason to think there wouldn’t be room for “pure code” folks. I use the camera comparison— I fully recognize it doesn’t map in all respect to this. But the idea that painters should have given up paint?
There were in fact people at the time who said, “Painting is dead!”. Gustav Flaubert, famous author, said painting was obsolete. Paul Delaroche Actually said it was dead. Idiots. Amazingly talented and accomplished, but short sighted, idiots. Well like be laughing at some amazing and talented people making such statement about code today in the same light.
Code as art? Well, two things: 1) LLM’s have tremendous difficulty parsing very dense syntax, and then addressing the different pieces and branching ideas. Even now. I’m guessing this transfers to code that must be compact, embedded, and optimized to a precision such that sufficient training data, generalizable to the task with all the different architectures of microcontrollers and embedded systems… not yet. My recommendation to coders who want to look for areas where AI will be unsuitable? There’s plenty of room at the bottom. Career has never taken me there, but the most fun I’ve had coding has been homebrew microcontrollers.
2) code as art. Not code to produce art, or not something separable from the code that created it. Think Thing minor things from the past like the obfuscated C challenges. Much of that older hacker ethos is fundamentally an artistic mindset. Art has a business model, some enterprising person aught to crack the code of coding code into a recognized art form where aesthetic is the utility.
I don’t even mean the visual code, but that is viable: Don’t many coders enjoy the visual aesthetic of source code, neatly formatted, colored to perfect contrasts between types etc? I doubt that’s the limit of what could be visually interesting, something that still runs. Small audience for it sure— same with most art.
Doesn’t matter, I doubt that will be something masses of coders turn to, but my point is simply that there are options there are options that involve continuing the “craft” aspects you enjoy, whether my napkin doodle of an idea above holds or not. The option, for many, may simply not include keeping the current trajectory of their career. Things change: not many professional coders that began at 20 in 1990 have been able— or willing— to stay in the narrow area they began in. I knew some as a kid that I still know, some that managed to stay on that same path. He’s a true craftsman at COBOL. When I was a bit older in one of my first jobs he helped me learn my way around a legacy VMS cluster. Such things persist, reduced in proportion to the rest is all. But that is an aspect of what’s happening today.
misrepresents my position a bit. Those were quite separate thoughts.
While I don't want to, I accept that others do, and will, and will be productive doing so.
What I won't accept is an attitude to bugs along the lines of “ah, that was the AI, what can you do?”, which implies either the tool is trusted far too much or people are simply being lazy. This already seems to be creeping in in places, and causes concerns about both security and stability if it is allowed to proliferate.
>there are options there are options that involve continuing the “craft” aspects you enjoy
My endgame is not to be beholden to any given corporations' sense of value (because it is rarely in the engineering), so I don't personally care what happens at large. I'll still enjoy the "craft" on my own and figure out the lines where I need to take a disciplined stance and grind it out myself, where I take on a dependency, or where I leave the work to a black box.
But if time comes for collaboration, then we'll work as a team. AKA we'll decide those lines and likely compromise on values to create something larger than the all of us. I doubt my line will ever be "let's just vibecode everything". But it's likely not going to be "use zero AI" unless I have a very disciplined team at hand and no financial stress between any of us.
>That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look?
A deca-billion dollar franchise now owned by a trillion dollar tech company... using it to make art that wouldn't pass a junior interview. It's no surprise there's such a strong rejection by the community who's paying attention. Cheaping out on a product a consumer pays $70 + a bunch of microtransactions for clearly shows the company's priorities.
Maybe there are spaces where you find success, but it's very clear that the water is muddying at large. You don't argue against a swamp by saying "but my corner here is clean!".
most people don't care and don't even know, and Activision correctly believed that it won't matter (doesn't matter)
... of course the whole company from Satya down to the idiot whatever art director who asked for this are impervious to shame, so yes, how it could matter? it's not like people bought the last ~10 years of CoD for its artistic value, people bought it because they wanted to switch off their brain and get shot and shouted at by teenagers
>and Activision correctly believed that it won't matter
The titanic had 3 days off warning. It took 3 hours to sink.
It "won't matter" until it does. And then it will collapse all at once. WWE 2K20 shows that even yearly franchises have breaking points where the backlash is too much to ignore.
But i guess Activision executives are thinking thwy will have jumped ship if and when that time hits.
"progress" is doing a lot of work here. Progress in what sense, and for whom? The jury is still out on whether LLMs even increase productivity (which is not the same as progress), and I say this as a user of LLMs.
Man, there is something true in what he is saying though. Can't you see it? I like the idea of some of this technology. I think its cool you can use natural language to create things. I think there is real potential in using these tools in certain context, but the way in which these tools got introduced, no transparency, how its being used to shape thought, the over-reliance on it and how its use to take away our humanity is a real concern.
If this tech was designed in an open way and not put under paywalls and used to develop models that are being used to take away peoples power, maybe I'd think differently. But right now its being promoted by the worst of the worst, and nobody is talking about that.
Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress.
If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.
>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place.
At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.
Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet.
Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.
I think that the ratio of weirdos doing stuff remained constant through the population, it's just that the whole population is now on the web, so they are harder to find.
Not to mention 20 years ago I personally (and probably others my age) had much more time to care about random weird stuff.
So, I am skeptical without some actual analysis or numbers that things really are so bad.
This is because in Web 1.0 times, only weird hacker types were capable of using the internet effectively. Normies (and weirdos who were weird in ways not related to familiarity with and interest in personal computer technology) were simply not using the internet in earnest, because it wasn't effective for their needs yet. Then people made that happen and now everyone is online, including boring normies with boring interests.
If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.
> If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.
That’s not what was said. What they said is that they wanted more people doing things for the pure joy of discovery, and to make that happen, everyone needs to have more free time and less financial stress or be able to make fun stuff WAY faster, like with LLMs!
> Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI.
True. And to some extent, I've seen more 'useless but fun' projects in the last year because they can be done in an afternoon rather than a week. We need more of that.
There's a mountain of software work you can do that doesn't involve participating in this rat race. There's nothing that says you need to make 500k and live in silicon valley. It's possible to be perfectly happy working integrating industrial control systems in a sleepy mountain town where cost of living is practically nothing. I am well qualified to make that statement.
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.
Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.
I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me.
I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice.
I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :)
For straightforward stuff, they can handle it.
For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up.
--
To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...)
I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience.
Now tell the AI to distill a bunch of user goals into a living system which has to evolve over time, integrate with other systems, etc etc. And deliver and support that system
I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers.
Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
right, but this is akin to arguing why the table saw also does not do x/y/z — I don't know why we only complain about AI and how it does NOT do everything well yet.
Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
I'm OK pondering the right use for the tool for as long as it'll take for the dust to settle. And I'm OK too trying some of it myself. What I resent is the pervasive request/pressure to use it everywhere right now, or 'be left out'.
My biggest gripe with the hype, as there's so much talk of craftmanship here, is: most programmers I've met hate doing code reviews and a good proportion prefer rewriting to reading and understanding other people's code. Now suddenly everyone is to be a prompter and astute reviewer of a flood of code they didn't write and now that you have the tool you should be faster faster faster or there's a problem with you.
well that's the issue. The table saw is a tool, we can very clearly agree it's good at cutting a giant plank of wood but horrible at screwing a bolt in. A carpenter can do both, but not a table saw. We never try to say the table saw IS the carpenter.
All this hype and especially the AGI talks want to treat the AI as an engineer itself. Even an assuredly senior engineer above is saying that it's better than them. So I think it's valid to ask "well can it do [thing a senior engineer does on the daily]" if we're suggesting that it can replace an engineer.
I'm not complaining about it, I said in my post that it's a huge time saver. It's here to stay, and that's pretty clear to see. It has mostly automated away the need for junior engineers, which just 5 years ago would have been a very unexpected outcome, but it's kind of the reality now.
All that being said:
There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument basically boils down to "AI bad". Those people are in trouble because they are also the people who insist on a whole committee meeting and trail of design documents to change the color of a button on a website that sells shoes. Most of their actual hard skills are pretty easy to outsource to an AI.
There's also a techbro segment of the population, who are selling snake oil about AGI being imminent, so fire your whole team and hire me in order to outsource your entire product to an army of AI agents. Their thoughts basically boil down to "I'm a grifter, and I smell money". Nevermind the fact that the outcome of such a program would be a smoldering tire fire, they'll be onto the next grift by then.
As with literally everything, there are loud, crazy people on either side and the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Junior engineers will be fine; OpenAI is actually choosing to hire juniors now because they just learned all their theory and structure, and are way more willing to push the LLMs to see what they can do.
Bad code is bad code. There’s been bad code since day one; the question is how fast are you willing to fail, learn, fail again, learn more, and keep going.
LLMs make failing fast nearly effortless, and THAT is power that I think young people really take to.
AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad
Too willing to write a ton of code - this is absolutely one of the things that drives me nuts. I ask it to write me a stub implementation and it goes and makes up all the details of how it works, 99% of which is totally wrong. I tell it to rename a file and add a single header line, and it does that - but throws away everything after line 400. Just unreliable and headache-inducing.
That's because there's nothing "craftsman" about using AI to do stuff for you. Someone who uses AI to write their programs isn't the equivalent of a carpenter using a table saw, they are the equivalent of a carpenter who subcontracts the piece out to someone else. And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.
But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.
Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly.
Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.
Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then? What is this "actually creating"? I'm sure he wasn't the one to do any of the "actually creating" and yet, there's no doubt in my mind that he deserves credit for the iPhone existing and changing the world.
> Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then?
No. Because he didn’t build it. He didn’t even have the idea for it. He gets respect for telling a lot of people “no” and for saying “not this” and “not that,” for being an excellent editor, but he does NOT get any credit for building m the iPhone.
That was thousands of other people.
By the way, what does being an editor look like?
It looks a lot like telling an LLM, “no, not that. Not that either. Try it this way. Mmm, not quite. Here, let me show you a sketch. Try something like that. Yes, that’s it!!”
I'm no fan of "AI" but I think it could be argued that if we're sticking to the metaphor, the carpenter can pick up the phone and subcontract out work to the lowest bidder, but perhaps that "work" doesn't actually require high craftsmanship. Or we could make the comparison that developers building systems of parts need to know how they all fit together, not that they built each part themselves, i.e., the carpenter can buy precut lumber rather than having to cut it all out of a huge trunk themselves.
It's very telling when someone invokes this comparison..I see it fairly often. It implies there is this hirearchy of skill/talent between the "architect" and the "bricklayer" such that any architect could be a bricklayer but a bricklayer couldn't be an architect. The conceit is telling.
I'm not implying a hierarchy of value or status here, btw. And the point about difficulty is interesting too. I did manual labor and it was much harder than programming, as you might expect!
You can certainly outsource "up", in terms of skill. That's just how business works, and life... I called a plumber not so long ago! And almost everyone outsources their health...
Almost every bit of work I've hired people to do has been through an intermediary of some sort. Usually one with "contractor" or "engineer" as a title. They are the ones who can organize others, have connections, understand talent, plan and keep schedules, recognize quality, and can identify and troubleshoot problems. They may also be craftsmen, or have once been, but the work is not necessarily their craft. If you want anything project-scoped, you have a team, there is someone in a leadership role (even if informally), someone handling the money, etc. Craftsmanship may or may not happen within that framework, they are somewhat orthogonal concerns, and I don't see any reason to disrespect the people that make room for it to happen.
Of course you can also get useless intermediaries, which may be more akin to vibe coding. Not entirely without merit, but the human in the loop is providing questionable value. I think this is the exception rather than the norm.
a) Nothing about letting AI do grunt work for you is "not being a craftsman".
b) Things are subcontracted all the time. We don't usually disrespect people for that.
Nothing craftsman? The detail required to setup a complex image gen pipeline to produce something the has the consistent style, composition, placement, etc, and quite a bit more-- for things that will go into production and need a repeatable pipeline-- it's huge. Take every bit as much creative vision.
Taking just images, consider AI merely a different image capture mechanism, like the camera is vs. painting. (You could copy.paste many critiques about this sort of ai and just replace it with "camera") Sure it's more accessible to a non professional, in AI's case much more so than cameras wear to years of learning painting. But there's a world of difference between what most people do in a prompt online and how professionals integrating it into their workflow are doing. Are such things "art"? That's not a productive question, mostly, but there's this: when it occurs, it has every bit as much intention, purpose and from a human behind it as that which people complain is lacking, but are referring to the one-shot prompt process in their mind when they do.
We need to find such craftsmen first. A true craftmaan should be able to let the code speak for itself. And ideally they'd be able to teach well enough to have other adapt such a workflow, which inevitably includes constraints and methodologies.
That's the things I don't see enough of in these discussions. We're very afraid to talk about what AI is bad at, as if it's some sort of pampered child we need to keep pleasing. That's not how we attain progress in the craft. Maybe in the stock market, but at that point it's clear what the focus is.
No, the idea is that such a CNC saw shouldn't need an operator at all. To the extent it still does, the operator doesn't even need to be in the same town, much less the same building.
Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker.
The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work.
The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.
Get some black dudes involved. Black dudes know how to keep it real.
(It will be interesting to see many people are able to accurately draw the conceptual line between what part of my sentiment is a joke and what part is serious.)
EDIT: Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message.
Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. And you had an entire group of people, whose existing ethos was based on appropriating and remixing and building something from the metal up, right there.
We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application.
We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible.
Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.
Each time someone says "we" without asking me I find it at least insulting. With this mindset the next step might be to tell me what I need, without considering my opinion.
Yes, the current system seems flawed, but is the best we came up with and is not fixed either, it is slowly evolving.
Yes, some resources are finite (energy from the sun seems quite plenty though), but don't think we will be ever able to define "fair". I would be glad with "do not destroy something completely and irremediably".
> We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application.
The thing about capitalism is that unecessary webshop isn't getting any customers if it's truly unecessary, and will soon be out of business. We can appreciate Ghostty, because why? Because the guy writing it is independently wealthy and can fly jets around for fun, and has deigned to grace us with his coding gifts once again? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice piece of software, but I don't know that system's any better.
I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible.
Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying.
You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat
I don't really see it any different than the Windows/Unix, Windows/Mac, etc, flame wars that boiled even amongst those with no professional stake it in for decades. Those were otherwise serious people too, parroting meaningless numbers and claims that didn't actually make much of a difference to them.
If anything, the AI takes are more much more meaningful. A Mac/PC flame war online was never going to significantly affect your career. A manager who either is all-in on AI or all-out on it can.
OS and IDE wars are something people take pretty seriously in their teens and very early careers, and eventually become more agnostic about after they realize it's not going to be the end-all predictor of coworker code quality. It predicts something for sure, but not strictly skill-level.
Language-preference wars stick around until mid-career for some, and again it predicts something. But still, serious people are not likely to get bogged down in pointless arguments about nearly equivalent alternatives at least (yaml vs json; python vs ruby).
Shallow takes on AI (whether they are pro or anti) are definitely higher stakes than all this, bad decisions could be more lasting and more damaging. But the real difference to my mind is.. AI "influencers" (again, pro or anti) are a very real thing in a way that doesn't happen with OS / language discussions. People listen, they want confirmation of biases.
I mean there's always advocates and pundits doing motivated reasoning, but usually it's corporate or individuals with clear vested interests that are trying to short-circuit inquiry and critical thinking. It's new that so many would-be practitioners in the field are eager to sabotage and colonize themselves, and forcing a situation where honest evaluations and merit-based discussion of engineering realities are impossible
> But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme
But this is philosophy (and ethics/morality)
My feelings about AI, about its impact on every aspect of our lives, on the value of human existence and the purpose of the creative process, have less to do with what AI is capable of and more to do with the massive failures of ethics and morality that surround every aspect of its introduction and the people who are involved.
This is classically framed as philosophy vs sophistry. The truth is that both are necessary, but only one makes money. When your entire culture assigns value with money it's obvious which way the scales will tip.
The fast inverse sqrt that John carmack did not. write also does well. I know there's many more. Are you sure that's not just a caricature of Hacker News you've built up in your head?
YES. The "This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative" is so incredibly true. I went to a privacy event about Web3, and the event organisers hired a photographer who took photos of everyone (no "no photo" stickers available), and they even flew a drone above our heads to take overarching videos of everyone :D I guess "privacy" should have been in quotes. All the values and aesthetics of the original set of people who actually cared about privacy (and were attracted to it) has been evaporated. All that remained are the hype. It was wild.
Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money."
"Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)
I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work.
No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them.
As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction.
I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc.
If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.
Well I have personally tested it on the green field projects I mostly work on and it does the grunt work of IAC (Terraform) and even did a decently complicated API with some detailed instructions like I would give another developer.
I’ve done literally dozens of short term quick turn around POCs from doing the full stack from an empty AWS account to “DevOps” to the software development -> training customers how to fish and showing them the concepts -> move on to next projects between working at AWS ProServe and now a third party consulting company. I’m familiar with the level of effort for these types of projects. I know how many fewer man hours it takes me now.
I have avoided front end work for well over a decade. I had to modify the front end part of the project we released to the customer that another developer did to remove all of the company specific stuff to make it generic so I could put it in our internal repo. I didn’t touch one line of front end code to make the decently extensive modifications, honestly I didn’t even look at the front end changes. I just made sure it worked as expected.
If you are “consulting” on an hourly rate, you’re doing it wrong. The company and I get paid for delivering projects not the number of hours we work. A smaller project may just say they have me for 6 weeks with known deliverable. I’m rarely working 40 hours a week.
When I did do one short term project independently, I gave them the amount I was going to charge for the project based on the requirements.
All consulting companies - including the division at AWS - always eventually expand to the staff augmentation model where you assign warm bodies and the client assigns the work. I have always refused to touch that kind of work with a ten foot pole.
All of my consulting work has been working full time and salaries for either the consulting division of AWS where I got the same structured 4 year base + RSUs as every other employee or now making the same amount (with a lot less stress and better benefits) in cash.
I’m working much less now than I ever have in my life partially because I’m getting paid for my expertise and not for how much code I can pump out.
I am working fewer hours. I at most work 4 hours a day unless it’s a meeting heavy day. I haven’t typed a line of code in the last 8 months yet I’ve produced just as much work as I did before LLMs.
Right now its just a tool you can use or not and if you are smart enough, you figure out very quickly when to use a tool for efficency and when not.
I do not vibe code my core architecture because i control it and know it very well. I vibe code some webui i don't care about or a hobby idea in 1-4h on a weekend because otherwise it would take me 2 full weekends.
I fix emails, i get feedback etc.
When I do experiemnts with vibe coding, i'm very aware what i'm doing.
Nonetheless, its 2025. Alone 2026 we will add so much more compute and the progress we see is just crazy fast. In a few month there will be the next version of claude, gpt, gemini and co.
And this progress will not stop tomorrow. We don't know yet how fast it will progress and when it will be suddenly a lot better then we are.
Additionally you do need to learn how to use these tools. I learned through vibe coding that i have to specify specific things i just assume the smart LLM will do right without me telling for example.
Now i'm thinking about doing an experiemnt were i record everything about a small project i want to do, to then subscribe it into text and then feeding it into an llm to strucuture it and then build me that thing. I could walk around outside with a headset to do so and it would be a fun experiemnt how it would feel like.
I can imagine myself having some non intrusive AR Google and the ai sometimes shows me results and i basically just give feedback .
I really agree with your point. I think that this forum being hackernews and all though lends itself to a slightly different kind of tech person. Who really values for themselves and their team, the art of getting stuck in with a deeply technical problem and being able to overcome it.
You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs.
If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game.
If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.
How many of them do you think started their companies out of “passion”?
Some of the ones I spotted checked had a couple of non technical founders looking for a “founding engineer” that they could underpay with the promise of “equity” that would probably be worthless.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that there's a shit ton of founders out there looking for a quick pay day (I'd guess the majority fall into that category). Just pointing out there are exceptions, and the exceptions can be quite successful.
This is the fate that befalls any wildly successful subculture: the MOPs start showing up, fascinated by it, and the sociopaths monetize it to get rich. The original geeks who created the scene become increasingly powerless.
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.
Developers waste a lot of time writing a bunch of boilerplate code that they hate writing and that doesn’t make them happy and has nothing to do with craftmanship. We also just spent 60 years in a culture that dignified work done by developers to the extreme, and honestly that produced some of the most narcissistic minds the world has ever seen: Thiel, Andressen, et al - and why? Because we dignify work in a capitalistic culture by increasing wages.
You want to talk about a culture that values craftmanship? Let everyone have the time and the freedom and the security to build whatever they want to build, instead of what they have to build in order to have health insurance.
> We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.
Uhhhhhh…..excuse me?
> despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.
More money was invested in the dot-com boom, and in the lead up to the railroad era, before anyone could ride. So this isn’t new.
I think this boilerplate thing got lost in translation some time ago.
We dislike _the presence_ of boilerplate, not the time spent writing it. If another thing writes it for you, it implies that _now boilerplate exists_, and it sucks.
It makes me unhappy when it exists. It makes me unhappy if it appears in seconds.
That said, there is some potential for using AI to reduce boilerplate and help create more meaningful software. However, that is definitely not the way things are shaping out to be.
Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message.
Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)
We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.
I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs.
The question about why you should care about others and not just yourself has literature stretching back thousands of years. Maybe start with one of the major world religions?
Have you seen the latest AI slop in game design lately, destroying human creativity?
Have you seen how this tech is being used to control narratives to subjugate populations to the will of authoritarian governments?
This shit is real. We are slowly sliding into a world where every aspect of our lives are going to be dictated by people in power with tools that can shape the future by manipulating what people think about.
If you don't care that the world is burning to the ground, good luck with that. Im not saying the tech is necessarily bad, its the way in which we are allowing it to be used. There has to be controls is place to steer this tech in the right direction or we are heading for a world I don't want to be apart of.
> This just in: 90% of everything is crap. AI does not, cannot, and will not change that.
Use a search engine. Such a disingenuous take. AI is demonstrably being used to flood the web with slop faster than humans ever could. Now 99% of everything will be crap, just like your takes.
"We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact."
I actually disagree with this pretty fundamentally. I've never seen hacker culture as defined by "craftsmanship" so much as about getting things done. When I think of our culture historically, it's cleverness, quick thinking, building out quick and dirty prototypes in weekend "hackathons", startup culture that cuts corners to get an MVP product out there. I mean, look at your URL bar: do you think YC companies are prioritizing artisanal lines of code?
We didn't trade craftsmanship for "Business Impact". The latter just aligns well with our culture of Getting Shit Done. Whether it's for play (look at the jank folks bring out to the playa that's "good enough") or business, the ethos is the same.
If anything, I feel like there has been more of an attempt to erase/sideline our actual culture by folks like y'all as a backlash against AI. But frankly, while a lot of us scruffy hacker types might have some concerns about AI, we also see a valuable tool that helps us move faster sometimes. And if there's a good tool that gets a thing done in a way that I deem satisfactory, I'm not going to let someone's political treatise get in my way. I'm busy building.
Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities.
This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact.
We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs.
There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.
In short, it's time to wake up.