HN user
This is a good take, junior engineers today and in the future will learn from making mistakes, they just won't look like the mistakes we made in the good ole days when everyone wrote code by hand.
You should lay off your engineering team and do it all in Lovable amigo.
At a shitty company. The problem is - you cannot ship a large amount of code quickly in a perfect way. Positioning the problem as "what's the point of generating all this code so fast if I still need a warm body at the end making sure it's OK?" is hilarious.
Don't do that. Just ship it. Yes, good tests, linting, etc will help but if you really believe you don't need humans in the loop at all, at least for the time being, you are fucked.
But go ahead, buy the hype. Your agent swarm can build an operating system in 15 minutes and everything will just work. Cool.
I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do."
It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments".
So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years.
I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.
Linear is what Jira was back around 2008-2009. I just started using it, it's a breath of fresh air.
The first step in fixing something is being aware that it needs to be fixed.
I just started using Linear, it is AI native/friendly and a million effing times less bloated than Jira. So long Jira. And I say that as an old shit who migrated from Bugzilla to Jira a long time ago and I remember how refreshing Jira felt at the time.
Git is better in some ways, but it is insanely complicated. That matters less now with AI tooling but still there was a time when we all had many choices (commercial and open source) for source control tools. My canonical example is git checkout -b <branch_name> for a new branch, git branch -D <branch_name> to delete the local branch and git push origin :<branch_name>.
I know that that is the old syntax but holy hell, that's insane. Why couldn't it always have been git branch --create|delete|delete-remote? It could have but Linus doesn't care about your feelings or small brain. :)
Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same.
The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.
There's a crazy amount of hype, fear and blatant lies in the mix. And the pace is absolutely bonkers. The pace of announcements is even more bonkers. Maybe things will settle down to a new normal at some point.
You might think that everyone has FOMO or is an anti-AI Luddite when of course there are a LOT of us somewhere in the middle, just trying to get our work done and trying to figure out what our careers will look like in 5-10 years.
One big thing that no one seems to talk about - GenAI is unlocking many new (and oftentimes "small") business ideas that were not practical just a few years ago. I have witnessed this firsthand. . . however, it will also take away jobs. How many, who knows?
tl;dr everyone is full of shit or selling something or terrified to the point where they can't think straight. And no one has a crystal ball.
I'm not convinced that the success and momentum of Claude Code will catch on with the general public. This feels like the one trick pony that's been groomed and billed as a racehorse. Or put another way Claude Cowork feels like Claude Code for people who don't code and are not interested in vibe coding.
We'll see.
Agreed, they overlap with QA engineers and Product Managers, with some level of technical skill on their own e.g. they might know Python pretty well.
I love that the dominant narrative with modern AI is "figure out who we can fire" pronto. I don't see a clear pattnern with juniors and seniors and AI. I know some younger engineers who are not embracing AI tools at all.
I'd say that AI tools make good engineers better and more productive and makes bad engineers appear to be more productive but ultimately makes them shoot themselves in the foot more thoroughly and quickly, while also piling up more work for everyone else.
I worked at company where the VP of engineering regularly stated that he "hated managing people". This is also the same guy who literally deleted the main production database because he was testing something out.
Also, probably an asshole
Because of the internet, and social media and specifically Instagram in this case, I see my aunt's artwork regularly. I live a few hours from her and see her once or twice a year. She is quite eccentric and her artwork is amazing. It's kind of sad that this is the best way for me to see her work. . . or it's not so sad, and really just convenient.
We are in a golden age for discovering art that you really wouldn't get to see otherwise. I would not even call myself a hardcore art enthusiast but I stumble upon great art all the time on Instagram, as you mentioned, from around the globe.
It's really cool.
I saw a LinkedIn post (I know, I know) talking about how soon agents will replace apps. . .
Because of course, LLM calls in a for loop are also not applications anymore.
I manage a team of software engineers. While they are all quite good at what they do and care about doing the Right Thing, collectively they're not always great at working towards a common goal.
One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.
It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).
I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.
It's funny, I've used them all too. . . I like GHA overall but it sure has its quirks.
Anyone who claims that GHA is garbage and any of the others are amazing is either doing something very basic or is crazy, or lying.
At the end of the day, you run shell scripts and commands using a YAML based config language (except for Jenkins). Amazingly, it's hard to build something that does that with the right abstractions and compromises between flexibility and good hygiene.
LOL - "forcing scrum"
It's funny that you didn't mention Google. They used to be "the" techies tech company.
It's not unrelated. They kicked him out or he just got sick of the company's direction. Or both.
Not a coincidence at all.
OpenTofu. Pulumi is cool especially if you want to run "code" code and not declarative code but Pulumi is in some ways the next Hashicorp. We'll see if they can manage to build a business and not become lame and evil like Hashicorp. OpenTofu is 100% open source.
Honestly, if they built a real scripting engine into OpenTofu, I'd be overjoyed. As it stands though, the declarative code (HCL) isn't the ugliest.
Exactly, the pure meritocracy bs is exactly that, bs. I realize that this isn't apparent to younger people necessarily. Reddit is cool but not exactly earth shattering technology. Luck was a huge factor in its success. I've been on reddit since 2005 FWIW.
Yep, he's basically preaching to a subset of young people who can help him make more money and tech fame.
I mean, it's not the worst thing he could do but it would be great if he at least acknowledged the privilege filter once in a while.
Google succeeded because they built a useful service and later were able to monetize it. Their timing could not have been better, searching the Internet at that time was horrendous.
I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds.
Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.
Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.
tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.
I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.
I have worked with/for dozens of startups. There are thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of fully remote startups.
As a user of many Google products and an old timer who legit appreciates how Google actually made it possible to search the internet effectively, I am no longer a Google fanboy.
I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected.
I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.