The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.
For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.
I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.
Is that AI? Or is it me?
Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.
Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)
But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.
Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.
My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.
I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.
Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.
Textbook FIRE strategy.
The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.
I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.
Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend
If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?
What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.
In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before
It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.
That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.
It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.
The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.
He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?
In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?
Asking for a friend.
That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code.
If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't
It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.
Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.
So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.
I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.
No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.
Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..
Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.
I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.
When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.
Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.
If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.
I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.
If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap.
And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap.
(Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).
I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.
The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.
They're getting outcompeted.
I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
But, as it stands today, I rarely touch any tech outside of work. Heck, I seldom ever bring my cell phone outside the home.
I long for the day, I can close my laptop lid and not open it again.
Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.
5/5 would recommend :-)
Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.
And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...
I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.
And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]
I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.
[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.
That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.
I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.
Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.
If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.
Hard to not use it
It's not cheap, but it's easier to do my job with the thought that I have art this week and next week and maybe I'll get to teach it someday too.
It feels healthy to not let your work control your life after retirement. There's so much else out there to do.
It's you. And that's fine.
You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.
I used to code at home - chess engines mostly.
Maybe once the novelty of retirement wears off (and the autumn approaches), I’ll start coding again
I write code in my spare time for fun and hobby and personal skill development and I don't use AI at all. AI isn't ruining anything for me.
> Is that AI? Or is it me?
I had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it for work, I don't think it was caused by AI.
Personally, I blame all the CV-driven development.
Playing with AI coding models can even give me a bit of the good times back.
Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”
- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).
Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%.
Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things.
My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)
Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied.
I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals.
I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.
