diamondap

I try to sketch out my own component design & architecture ahead of time. Then I ask AI to generate code one class at a time, or even one method at a time. That makes code review much easier for me. It also allows me to understand the code, so that when issues come up in production, I know what to look at and how the code actually works.

I feel the same way. I miss the joy of creative flow that came with architecting and solving problems. I also feel the entire computer tech industry is headed in the wrong direction. We're creating systems that are too complex to understand, that lack human discretion when it's most needed, and then we're turning over control of whole organizations to those systems.

onion2k has a point. You can still write a lot of code by hand, or at least write the interesting code by hand, but your output may fall behind your peers.

After 27 years in the industry, I've cut down to part-time software dev work, and I've enjoyed learning and doing more hands-on work, including bicycle and motorcycle repair. It's actually really nice to get away from the screen and the constant reading of internet garbage during those down times when I'm waiting for tests to run or an AI bot to come back with a response. My mind feels less polluted. But I'm not making money at my new hobbies.

My answer to your question is I don't know. But often, if you can free up some time and mental space, you'll find you start to drift toward other things that interest you.

It is extremely mentally demanding to do both, even for someone with an overactive brain. I reached a point of severe burnout in 2025 and cut back to part-time work. I'll have to ramp up my hours again soon because, contrary to one of the other comments, I didn't get rich during 1990s/2000s boom.

As for how I did it, I would wake up very early and put in a few hours of writing, then I would put in a full day's work at the office. After my first twelve years or so in the industry, coding was almost second nature and came quite easily. Also, I do much of my writing and programming in my head while I'm walking, running or biking. (I bike to work and back every day.) By the time I sit down to write or code, I already know what I'm going to write, so it's just a matter of getting it through the keyboard.

But yeah, do both for a few years and it really taxes your brain. In both novel writing and programming, you're carrying an entire world in your brain: the plot and characters are one world, the architecture of the software you're working on is another. By 2025, I truly, literally felt like I needed to be shipped off to a madhouse in the countryside. A hundred years ago, people used to call that "the rest cure for a nervous breakdown."

Anyway, cutting back to part-time work has been a huge help. Sanity restored.

Ha! I started my career in a company where I had to pump out custom web apps as fast as humanly possible. The apps were successful, and then I had to maintain them for several years. That's where the real learning occurred. I learned the cost of every one of my shortcuts and poor design decisions the hard way.

Many years ago, some famous developer said, "Always write your code as if the person who's going to maintain it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." As I fixed my poor design choices one by one over endless late nights, I sometimes felt the anger of a violent psychopath toward the former, ignorant me who had stupidly plagued current me with all these problems.

When you learn the hard way, you know exactly why good design decisions are considered good. In later jobs, one of my fundamental goals for every new project was "I never want me or anyone else to have to answer a 3 a.m. call about why this system isn't working."

I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with ghostscript. I would like to remove ghostscript from the mix, so when I have some time, I may try again to do it all with WeasyPrint.

Kudos to you for doing that.

I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor edits after publication is also painful, as the author notes, and can be error prone if you fail to make identical changes to all formats.

The problem was bad enough that I built by own markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript. This also allows me to use git for version control, and I can make formatting changes using vanilla CSS. My tools are currently too crude for the average non-tech writer to use, but they save me hours every time I use them.

For any of you hackers out there looking for an untapped market, try making a user-friendly tool that converts Word, PDF and/or similar formats to the print-ready PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 formats. At the moment, all the existing tools are proprietary and expensive, and many are difficult to use. This won't be a big money maker, but it will certainly be welcome by many indie authors.

> Humans are objectively quite cheap.

I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degree), and may also have a family and a mortgage. They have relatively high salaries, plus health insurance, and they can't work when they're sleeping, sick or on vacation.

I once worked for a software consultancy where the owner said, "The worst thing about owning this kind of company is that all my capital walks out the door at six p.m."

AI won't do that. It'll work round the clock if you pay for it.

We do still need a human in the loop with AI. In part, that's to check and verify its work. In part, it's so the corporate overlords have someone to fire when things go wrong. From the looks of things right now, AI will never be "responsible" for its own work.

I think AI will substantially thin out the ranks of programmers over the next five years or so. I've been very impressed with Claude 4.5 and have been using it daily at work. It tends to produce very good, clean, well-documented code and tests.

It does still need an experienced human to review its work, and I do regularly find issues with its output that only a mid-level or senior developer would notice. For example, I saw it write several Python methods this week that, when called simultaneously, would lead to deadlock in an external SQL database. I happen to know these methods WILL be called simultaneously, so I was able to fix the issue.

In existing large code bases that talk to many external systems and have poorly documented, esoteric business rules, I think Claude and other AIs will need supervision from an experienced developer for at least the next few years. Part of the reason for that is that many organizations simply don't capture all requirements in a way that AI can understand. Some business rules are locked up in long email threads or water cooler conversations that AI can't access.

But, yeah, Claude is already acting like a team of junior/mid-level developers for me. Because developers are highly paid, offloading their work to a machine can be hugely profitable for employers. Perhaps, over the next few years, developers will become like sys admins, for whom the machines do most of the meaningful work and the sys admin's job is to provision, troubleshoot and babysit them.

I'm getting near the end of my career, so I'm not too concerned about losing work in the years to come. What does concern me is the loss of knowledge that will come with the move to AI-driven coding. Maybe in ten years we will still need humans to babysit AI's most complicated programming work, but how many humans will there be ten years from now with the kind of deep, extensive experience that senior devs have today? How many developers will have manually provisioned and configured a server, set up and tuned a SQL database, debugged sneaky race conditions, worked out the kinks that arise between the dozens of systems that a single application must interact with?

We already see that posts to Stack Overflow have plummeted since programmers can simply ask ChatGPT or Claude how to solve a complex SQL problem or write a tricky regular expression. The AIs used to feed on Stack Overflow for answers. What will they feed on in the future? What human will have worked out the tricky problems that AI hasn't been asked to solve?

I read a few years ago that the US Navy convinced Congress to fund the construction of an aircraft carrier that the Navy didn't even need. The Navy's argument was that it took our country about eighty years to learn how to build world-class carriers. If we went an entire generation without building a new carrier, much or all of that knowledge would be lost.

The Navy was far-sighted in that decision. Tech companies are not nearly so forward thinking. AI will save them money on development in the short run, but in the long run, what will they do when new, hard-to-solve problems arise? A huge part of software engineering lies in defining the problem to be solved. What happens when we have no one left capable of defining the problems, or of hammering out solutions that have not been tried before?

OK, maybe it isn't capitalism but US society that implies that promise. Many (insensitive) people respond to tales of economic woe by saying, "Get a job!" As if that's going to solve even your basic money woes. As others in this discussion have noted, many people employed full time still struggle to provide the basics. That part of the social contract just isn't holding up for a lot of people. And that's a recipe for social unrest.

There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they're distributing three times as many meals per month as they served before the pandemic. And this is an area of relatively high employment.

People working service jobs simply can't afford the basics, and that's a problem. Part of capitalism's implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be true anymore.

My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."

I love this part:

> A workman could check the stone size himself by seeing if the stone would fit into his mouth.

They're probably laying down over a million stones per mile. Do all of them have to pass through a workman's mouth?