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yhcj 5 hours ago [-]
OP and long time lurker here, I'm desperate and looking for honest-to-god advice on what to do.
I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation.
I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise.
I don't own a car because I love walking, and such.
So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living).
Luckily I have some savings and I have other interests from years of doing random jobs and businesses, and as much as I love programming, especially with others, I think very few of us still want to program.
I'm like the Last Samurai of programming while everyone is using AI-assisted gattling guns.
Is it time to let go?
aprilthird2021 1 hours ago [-]
No it's absolutely not time to let go. You are one of a limited set of people with pre-AI taste and intuition for good software. They aren't making any more of them. And you'll be a super valuable asset anywhere you go.
I mean, if you want to retire go ahead, but don't do it because of AI. AI is just a tool to generate code faster. It doesn't replace the work of actually making design decisions and knowing what will scale and what's better going forward vs what will work now but spiral into unmanageable spaghetti code soon (yes AIs also have a harder time managing messy code than neat code)
probably_wrong 47 minutes ago [-]
I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers" [1], but I fear the truth may be closer to "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".
In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents. And let's not forget that we are part of an industry whose motto is "move fast and break things". Sure, NASA has a zero-bugs approach to software dev, but they don't have room for all of us.
This is what’s know as “cope”. People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI. That is the basis of what people were hired on before AI, because no alternative existed.
Valodim 19 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't sound like AI is necessarily the root the problem. If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it. You just figured it out sooner.
Or, if you have reason to believe he's got what it takes - treat it like an leaving opportunity, give him room to make mistakes. This is, ime, what a rookie AI user mistake looks like.
It is easy to get carried away by the momentum. Many have fallen into that trap, not all are irredeemably bad software engineers.
Valodim 18 minutes ago [-]
*learning opportunity. Damn autotype
mbrumlow 46 minutes ago [-]
The problem is not vibe coding. The problem is the people doing this were never good software engineers before vibe coding.
Simply put you still need good practices to produce working good code with AI.
Oddly what I have found best is patterns that many would cringe and demeans unit test and integration test.
Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test, but more than ever I have to put on my PM and QA hat, even more so with web dev.
For me the only part of the process that has changed is I don’t write the code. I still setup environments to run the code, I still manually poke at things I suspect will be fragile. But most importantly I still always run the software before shipping it.
onesandofgrain 16 minutes ago [-]
This is enforced in my company so buckle up
k310 5 hours ago [-]
> After this project, I'm done. I might turn into a yoga teacher.
I gather that you don't have the "juice" to demand better. Even AI testing AI would be better (in some parallel universe?) than not testing at all.
So become a consultant, preaching the simple gospel of "test this goddamn thing before unleashing it, or the tougher gospel of "Well if AI is doing all the work, then why don't you find a job that tolerates garbage?"
I almost always had more responsibility than authority, except for a job where I actually had a field team. They were laid off by the "authorities" in order of greatest competence first and I ended up with one guy who made countless goofs, like creating overlapping disk partitions. I ended up redoing all his work, more than doubling my load. Does that sound familiar?
In your case, it sounds like you will end up similarly, unless you find a way get your management to establish a "No broken shit" rule. I know that's daunting, and in many jobs, I could only finagle minor changes, usually by talking with other people more tenured, who had a piece of management's ear.
If it amounts to "I must double my work or this all falls apart" while your partner pushes buttons (my charge was a "button-pusher"), then leave, and good luck.
But do give it one college try to get some sanity into the system.
yhcj 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks for your reply.
I did work as an Engineering Manager for a bit but honestly hated it with my guts. Promised myself I would never do that again. I have two young children so they're a bigger priority right now.
Not to sound pretentious but I was top 10 in my country (for example, I read a 500-page book on Assembly language the night before and aced a test that 90% of people failed) so it's really hard for me to work with people who don't get things as fast as I do.
Nothing to brag as it really isn't all hard work, I'm just quite neurodivergent compared to the average. It comes with A LOT of downsides (some nights I only sleep 2 hours because I came up with the solution to a hard problem while I was asleep and wake up to code it and it works)
Now, all this is because I am now at a crossroad where I have enough money and life experience in other jobs (I stopped programming for 10 years in fact because I had a pretty successful business).
The sad part is that I rekindled my love with programming in the last decade (I'm past 40), but it might be time to let it go and go back to doing business.
EDIT: I did work as a consultant (reluctantly) and was charging $500/hr because I really didn't like it but the demand was there. With the economy not being what it was and all the "AI prompt vibe coders" etc blah blah out there I don't really know what's a good rate now.
k310 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know about "coding from scratch". Everything seems to have gone up one notch, and I don't really know what that implies.
I'm a real old-timer and really wanted that kind of leap for a long time, and delved into scripting languages and even dataflow as in the old Prograph [0], but did mostly sysadmin kinds of chores, with some very fun scientific simulations (so that upper management, even older than I was) could use them, in Hypercard, and that dead-ended.
If the next step is to build upon "building blocks" I'd like to see THOSE blocks thoroughly tested, as math libraries are to a great degree, and not ad-hoc. The most annoying thing I find about LLM's is their propensity to reinvent wheels every time. This may be inherent in the design, I don't know. But a serious business or other project should insist on reliable reusable blocks.
Perhaps the current situation is more like rounding up animals after they broke out of the zoo than caring for them, before it stabilizes if it ever does.
I nag people here to meet some real unmet needs, particularly for seniors, not just because I am one, but because I have had a lot of ideas on what to do, especially about building community and services. The internet is just too savage a place for most. I'll bet that the people approaching senior status will bitch about the lack of real self-driving cars, exoskeletons, and fraud-proof networks of trust, compared to the chainsaw internet of scams --- that THEY could have solved.
Create a "programmable internet" to get around all the annoyances, traps and dark patterns? I do it all the time, working around annoyances, popups, scams, paywalls. The average person isn't going to be able to do these things, not even with the leveling up of programming, but perhaps via proxy. Just as everyone seems to be putting up a shield, with endless CAPTCHAS (and I have browser extentions to solve these relentless eye exams) maybe users need a shield themselves.
But I ramble.
Good luck in whatever you decide to do.
Tally your strengths and strongest interests. Enjoy your family. I was posting elsewhere about some of the insane managers I've endured but memories and photos (some scanned from the film days) of being a parent are the real heart and soul of life. I have read some really insightful articles on what skills will be needed in the next few years and I'll summarize as I make sense of them.
I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation.
I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise.
I don't own a car because I love walking, and such.
So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living).
Luckily I have some savings and I have other interests from years of doing random jobs and businesses, and as much as I love programming, especially with others, I think very few of us still want to program.
I'm like the Last Samurai of programming while everyone is using AI-assisted gattling guns.
Is it time to let go?
I mean, if you want to retire go ahead, but don't do it because of AI. AI is just a tool to generate code faster. It doesn't replace the work of actually making design decisions and knowing what will scale and what's better going forward vs what will work now but spiral into unmanageable spaghetti code soon (yes AIs also have a harder time managing messy code than neat code)
In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents. And let's not forget that we are part of an industry whose motto is "move fast and break things". Sure, NASA has a zero-bugs approach to software dev, but they don't have room for all of us.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646820
Or, if you have reason to believe he's got what it takes - treat it like an leaving opportunity, give him room to make mistakes. This is, ime, what a rookie AI user mistake looks like.
It is easy to get carried away by the momentum. Many have fallen into that trap, not all are irredeemably bad software engineers.
Simply put you still need good practices to produce working good code with AI.
Oddly what I have found best is patterns that many would cringe and demeans unit test and integration test.
Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test, but more than ever I have to put on my PM and QA hat, even more so with web dev.
For me the only part of the process that has changed is I don’t write the code. I still setup environments to run the code, I still manually poke at things I suspect will be fragile. But most importantly I still always run the software before shipping it.
I gather that you don't have the "juice" to demand better. Even AI testing AI would be better (in some parallel universe?) than not testing at all.
So become a consultant, preaching the simple gospel of "test this goddamn thing before unleashing it, or the tougher gospel of "Well if AI is doing all the work, then why don't you find a job that tolerates garbage?"
I almost always had more responsibility than authority, except for a job where I actually had a field team. They were laid off by the "authorities" in order of greatest competence first and I ended up with one guy who made countless goofs, like creating overlapping disk partitions. I ended up redoing all his work, more than doubling my load. Does that sound familiar?
In your case, it sounds like you will end up similarly, unless you find a way get your management to establish a "No broken shit" rule. I know that's daunting, and in many jobs, I could only finagle minor changes, usually by talking with other people more tenured, who had a piece of management's ear.
If it amounts to "I must double my work or this all falls apart" while your partner pushes buttons (my charge was a "button-pusher"), then leave, and good luck.
But do give it one college try to get some sanity into the system.
I did work as an Engineering Manager for a bit but honestly hated it with my guts. Promised myself I would never do that again. I have two young children so they're a bigger priority right now.
Not to sound pretentious but I was top 10 in my country (for example, I read a 500-page book on Assembly language the night before and aced a test that 90% of people failed) so it's really hard for me to work with people who don't get things as fast as I do.
Nothing to brag as it really isn't all hard work, I'm just quite neurodivergent compared to the average. It comes with A LOT of downsides (some nights I only sleep 2 hours because I came up with the solution to a hard problem while I was asleep and wake up to code it and it works)
Now, all this is because I am now at a crossroad where I have enough money and life experience in other jobs (I stopped programming for 10 years in fact because I had a pretty successful business).
The sad part is that I rekindled my love with programming in the last decade (I'm past 40), but it might be time to let it go and go back to doing business.
EDIT: I did work as a consultant (reluctantly) and was charging $500/hr because I really didn't like it but the demand was there. With the economy not being what it was and all the "AI prompt vibe coders" etc blah blah out there I don't really know what's a good rate now.
I'm a real old-timer and really wanted that kind of leap for a long time, and delved into scripting languages and even dataflow as in the old Prograph [0], but did mostly sysadmin kinds of chores, with some very fun scientific simulations (so that upper management, even older than I was) could use them, in Hypercard, and that dead-ended.
If the next step is to build upon "building blocks" I'd like to see THOSE blocks thoroughly tested, as math libraries are to a great degree, and not ad-hoc. The most annoying thing I find about LLM's is their propensity to reinvent wheels every time. This may be inherent in the design, I don't know. But a serious business or other project should insist on reliable reusable blocks.
Perhaps the current situation is more like rounding up animals after they broke out of the zoo than caring for them, before it stabilizes if it ever does.
I nag people here to meet some real unmet needs, particularly for seniors, not just because I am one, but because I have had a lot of ideas on what to do, especially about building community and services. The internet is just too savage a place for most. I'll bet that the people approaching senior status will bitch about the lack of real self-driving cars, exoskeletons, and fraud-proof networks of trust, compared to the chainsaw internet of scams --- that THEY could have solved.
Create a "programmable internet" to get around all the annoyances, traps and dark patterns? I do it all the time, working around annoyances, popups, scams, paywalls. The average person isn't going to be able to do these things, not even with the leveling up of programming, but perhaps via proxy. Just as everyone seems to be putting up a shield, with endless CAPTCHAS (and I have browser extentions to solve these relentless eye exams) maybe users need a shield themselves.
But I ramble.
Good luck in whatever you decide to do.
Tally your strengths and strongest interests. Enjoy your family. I was posting elsewhere about some of the insane managers I've endured but memories and photos (some scanned from the film days) of being a parent are the real heart and soul of life. I have read some really insightful articles on what skills will be needed in the next few years and I'll summarize as I make sense of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph