I kind of expected this to happen: Coding will become an "artisanal craft" - much like woodworking for example. Sure for most of your furniture you can just go to ikea but every now and then you might get joy from making something with your own hands.
I'm kinda bored to read these pro AI arguments, which seem to come by waves. Suddenly everyone seems to say the same thing at the same time and it's been like this for months. Previously it was "it's there to stay", and then "you will be left behind if you don't use it", and this week it's "coding by yourself is for hobbies" or "is like artisanal work [which is cute but not really productive]".<p>Is it the $3B anthropic pretends to spend on marketing doing its job?
It’s the most obvious conclusion, once you start using LLMs. There’s no grand conspiracy here
What's your opinion?
I mean you can be bored all you want, but the technology works. That's the difference. This isn't cryptocurrency where "you gotta get in to make it big (because I need to sell it to you)". It works: the results are real, the code runs, you can read it - the systems it provides are real.<p>Even the security argument has evaporated: AIs now hack better then people. They're better bug-finders then developers. The tool which exploits your app itself would be another AI system. On a good day you might be smarter then it...but you're not faster, and you don't have the perseverance.<p>My challenge would simply be: buy a low-tier Claude license. Or some other system - I use Claude so that's the example. Point it at something you wrote. And realize in the span of about an hour how obsolete the human developer writing code truly is.
Yeah, we know. The technology is definitely impressive, and kinda fascinating actually, I must admit. If you ignore the huge externalities and all the problems it creates, that is.<p>Can you just guys go vibecoding and stop trying to convince us or yourselves?
Dan Luu's recent blog post [0] reminded me of Gas Town. Gas Town was all the hype when it debuted. Us, mere mortals, had a few days left in the business of software. Now, only the crickets remain in the Gas Town. Not even its creator is there [1].<p>[0] We should be more ambitious with the software we build. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695</a><p>[1] <a href="https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353</a>
I don’t know, I feel like he is using a lot more convincing arguments than just being dismissive without real substance like you are. When you say huge externalities are you referring to something that hasn’t been seen in other major industrial paradigm shifts?
Whats the arguments?? They're making sensationalist claims based of headlines and twitter discourse. This is all zeitgeist nonsense, anyone using AI on the day to day for hard problems knows its capabilities are far less than what you'll see claimed on this site, x the everything app, and LinkedIn.<p>There's genuinely just a ton of people who work on 40th percential problems and are super impressed. There's people who work on 90th percentile problems who are impressed too, but if you put those 40th percentile problem solvers on the 90th percentile problems they would not have the same outcomes. The agents by themselves are not as impressive as they're made out to be.
So I would completely agree with you concerning things like my dayjob. But maybe there are some details and edge cases being overlooked.<p>Like I would love to make an indie game as good as like Shovel Knight, Celeste, or Into the Breach. I know these are extremely ambitious goals but AI should make my 1000x more productive, right? ... right?<p>But what Imve realized is that for someone not in the industry and without the experience I'll provably never make it.<p>You could blame this on the fact that games are asset heavy and involve interaction, but even then, it seems like just pulling a slot machine after your project gets to a certain size.<p>I'll accept that AI will most certainly be used to great effect in this industry but I don't believe some factory paradigm will arrive leveling an ignoramus like me and an "artisan" to be equal.
Programming has arguably never been the most important part of making video games though, except when people stuff it up and a game doesn't run well on the hardware people want to play it on.<p>Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.<p>Arguably <i>if you wanted to make games</i> then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.
They arent better bug finders, I can assure you. They definately are great fuzzing tools, but if you really think AI is a better bug hunter than humans there's millions in bounties waiting for you and your claude code session to pick up off the ground. I can assure you its not what you think it is.
I'm not sure that societal trends can be extrapolated from YouTube videos, certainly not from <i>one</i> YouTube video, or channel. There's a lot of oddball stuff on YouTube that, if taken to be definitive would have you, for example, believing that the human race is becoming MMORPG players from New Zealand.<p>What it might illustrate is that "No AI" and long-format are currently seen as ways of attracting attention.
I can't believe that in the space of only a few short years the notion of coding by hand is, by many people, seen as over. It's not.
While I like the analogy, I'm not sure it holds how I think of AI. I'd do woodworking because I want better quality for less money, and that's why I use AI now. "Hand crafting" code might be fun but it doesn't get you it cheaper or better anymore IMHO
Better quality for less money? No. You do woodworking (if in fact you do) because you enjoy it. The time spent making a decent piece of furniture you could work at McDonald’s and buy a nicer piece in less time it takes to master woodworking.<p>So, don’t kid yourself! You enjoy it, and if you’ve mastered the skill then naturally you can save money over time. But I’d wager you spend more in hours mastering the skill than if you were to buy a couple pieces of furniture. ;)
I am sorry, but this kind of comment has become too common on this site. It underestimates the kind of code a highly efficient human being coder is capable of writing and managing over a long period of time ( which is what is required in a real job, btw ).<p>The only thing that I think coding agents are better than good human coders is the ability to generate a lot of usable code in a shorter period of time.<p>But can they maintain it over a long period of time? I highly doubt that, given the evidence that I have with me. Coding agents under-perform quite often in my line of work. They overproduce and yet are not able to cover the given requirements.<p>Sometimes they do 100% of the given task, but miss a slight detail ( given clearly in the prompt ), that renders their product unusable. This quite often results in a complete rewrite - consuming more, guess what, tokens!!!<p>So anyone who thinks that right now, coding agents can replace human coders completely, is really not working with these agents long enough or hard enough.<p>Once you start demanding from agents the same quality of code and the added responsibility/liability that you would associate with a human code, you will sure see the difference and I can tell you that its a lot.<p>I work with Opus 5.5 and Codex Astra 6 on a wide range of projects and they are found completely wanting in certain situations where a human would be more trustworthy and produce better results.
just like artisanal pasta (read: a human willingly spend time to cut the pasta from the pasta machine), we'll charge double
Having purchased furniture recently, it is not easy to get what you exactly have in mind or get matching things for a room. So there is value in building furniture by hand.<p>Not sure about coding though. There could be some thing which humans will do better. Maybe humans will always be better at understanding intent of other humans as they share same biology.
Just like how IKEA furniture is plasterboard trash compared to the quality that we used to have with furniture (and can still get if we pay large sums), so has ai reduced code quality to this messy homogeneous pulp.