> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it

I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since.

A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by it. Arguments that try to window-dress this away are not particularly productive.

*learning opportunity. Damn autotype

Thanks for your input. I find testing (especially FE, where a single change can ripple through the whole chain) is actually a great way to use LLMs

It's sad because I've known this guy for 20 years and since the beginning he had a tendency towards "work smarter, not harder", a good motto at the time you're 20 but I often saw it crippling him in the long run, while having short-term gains.

Long-term, funny enough, he said he wanted back into this project because he was very unsatisfied with "easy money" (we both got into SEO at the right time and made a ton of easy money) and wants something stimulating for his brain.

In the meantime I had kids, worked my ass off to get the health and fitness level I want (he also wants it... alas nothing changes).

I'm kind of quite committed to this and we're maybe 30% away from finishing, but I almost debate sometimes if I should just do the FE vibe-coded and let him see that it won't be as good as I can manually do it (FE is hard in the end). Just get it out of the door, keep the customers that we have and let it kind of die down.

The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools.

Two things you can do regarding programming here.

1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.

2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.

I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.

I also really enjoy programming, and relate to your comment below about sometimes waking up in the middle of the night because your brain figured out how to code a hard problem.

Sorry to hear you're having a rough time with work. I do think AI availability has made otherwise smart people put out lazy work. But I also think that there are more people who still "code by hand" than you think.

You might find some joy by going to certain events where people talk about different items coding-wise. I enjoyed the talks for this conference recently https://www.youtube.com/@softwareshouldwork (particularly Richard Hipp's, Delaney Gillilan's and Carson Gross' talks), maybe you can find similar spaces. The benefit has been Youtube's algorithm recommending me better software talks now too.

I think AI is not really the subject. You probably chose a bad partner. As for quitting, since you mentioned gardening:

"C’est une folie de haïr toutes les roses parce qu’une épine vous a piqué."

I’ve been on a sabbatical for 99% of this year, small pockets of time spent doing some maintenance for clients I love.

I bought a seriously derelict property in country Australia and am having a good time slowly fixing it up.

I’ll get back to programming next year, hopefully the blow-ins have moved on to the next hype cycle by that time.

> who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation

A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process.

But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN.

The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone using a Python-like language.

Of course, I didn't use AI, because where is the fan in this? In "normal life" (work, personal projects), it is very hard for me to convince myself to do anything manually, because generating code is more efficient. But in a game, using AI assistance would be like using aimbot in a shooter or a cheatcode in some other game. Yeah, it's much more efficient, but what is the point? There is no challenge and no fun that comes from overcoming the challenge.

So, anyway, I was writing code by hand for the first time in I-don't-even-remember-how-many years. And it was so much fun. I don't remember when was the last time I felt so engaged, so immersed, so "in the flow".

So, yeah. After all, maybe I'm not a ruthless pragmatic who only cares about the final result and doesn't gives a shit, how did he get there...

You are far from alone on that path and indeed I also wonder if it may be time to let it go.

Just find a better place to go. If you have savings, quit this nonsense and start looking for something else while working on yourself.

I just got back to working on a project I like where we don't use any LLMs for code generation because we think it kind of sucks and leads to bad results unless it's for incredibly small contexts (which is usually not worth the prompting).

You're also not as alone as you think in actually liking programming enough to do it by hand even after having used LLMs. There's also the fact that you build more theory up by actually writing the code anyway, so someone who actually wants to know their code base intimitely will always have to write the code.

Why not become a machine gun operator?

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)

exactly how I feel. I mean let's face it, we were overpaid and underworked because we were considered magicians, but the magic is gone.

What I fear is that it's impossible for the untrained to see the difference between a highly-technical developer and the vibe-coder.

Software is so buggy nowadays (just look at Facebook, or Facebook Ads. Crazy) I wonder what's going to happen in the long run.

I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah, have you tried debugging AI-generated codes of thousands of lines where the original dev doesn't exist? It's a mess I don't wanna clean up.

Man, I would straight up tell them I will use AI to review that crap and so be it. In fact this is what I tell to colleagues if they send my non-tested vibe-coded stuff or vibe-generated documentation. Everyone can generate shit today, but I believe testing, reviewing, writing docs, etc. must still go through humans.

haha seriously? Damn I really gotta buckle up

That's the thing, that's how he started, but knowing his personality, I knew the temptation would be too high. I warned him.

Then yesterday when I started asking him questions about how certain stuff worked, he had absolutely no clue.

He didn't even read the docs summarizing what the PR did.

In his mind AI is just assisting him. It's just like the alcoholic saying "one more drink won't harm me, I can quit any time".

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.

Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?

used to respect my skills, since we started this project before AI, but as I told him in the beginning, the more he asks a sycophantic AI stuff, while asking me less, the less he will respect my opinion. It's just the nature of things.

You like those who agree with you more than those who disagree, but real-life learning doesn't come from everyone telling you you are correct all the time.

I believe we're at the point of no return where he didn't ask me a single question before sending a 5K LOC PR

> I’m using models, I’ve built two whole projects without looking at more than 1% of code, but I’ve tested the interface and went through data on disk to verify the assumptions.

so, would you say "no worries man I know what I'm doing" about how you use AI?

> Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test,

False sense of security. What's stopping the agents from doing an elaborate form of "Assert.IsTrue(true)" in some/most/all of the tests since you are vibing it and not reviewing it?

> The problem is not vibe coding.

Except that it is the enabler. Without AI there are no 5K lines of code that no human has ever seen. AI introduces a new category of problem that did not exist before.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Issue at hand is if you're working in an environment that enables such people and even encourages that behaviour. Suddenly, their voice is the same where it was never even a whisper before, and you can't do anything about it. It is extremely demotivating and I would actually propose a more radical approach to it - either embrace the shit in full and commit to it as well or really do engage into another company where there's a better filter for hiring. The latter are usually smaller companies because they can't afford no to.

Well said. The problem is that vibe coding can paper over bad engineering practices for awhile. And results look good, and when you raise concerns people look at you like you're dumb and trying to slow things down.

But the underlying bad practices _will_ bite the same they would have before AI, you just don't know when.

It's a really frustrating state of the industry to be in.