Ask HN: Dealing with Vibe Coding Depression?
While originally I was an LLM skeptic, I was also eager to gain insight into it’s true capabilities, and recently I’ve reached the tipping point of existantial dread - I no longer feel any joy while coding. I’m no longer an artisan enjoying the journey of creating, I’m now truly a cog designed to review factory output until even that role is no longer required.
My biggest feeling right now is an immense sense of loss. My belief was that the purpose of one’s life is found through acts of creation. The painter finds joy in painting, and the result is valued because of the effort involved. This feels like an attack on all intellectual pursuits, including the arts, but it’s especially hard considering the technology seems to have the most value at replacing its creators.
Where do we go from here? So many of my friends have talked about switching fields, as we watch this miracle field edge towards becoming a facsimile of itself. I am personally left with many questions about my own future.
There is a sad reality and truthfulness is that you're probably experiencing that dread for nothing. Tech is moving forward but there is an underlying hype thesis that has really yet to become a reality.
The creators at these companies are making all their bets that the switch between interpolate and extrapolate will happen at sometime in the very near future.
If and when that fails to materialize (as I think you could argue some companies are already recognizing is coming, ie Microsoft), the bubble will burst.
The more America fails financially the more the AI doomer narrative is pushed. Big tech needs there to be value gains to justify themselves. The American stock market is mostly down to them now.
I'm just trying to keep a frame of mind that there are new problems to solve and bigger problems can be solved by smaller teams of people.
I think the reality is that software engineering, and soon all knowledge work, are going to transform profoundly like you're noticing.
Where we go depends on the philosophy we apply, and there's way too little philosophy for what to do when AI upends your intellectual craft profession.
All businesses exist to serve a customer, and to help them achieve the outcomes they desire, so to the extent that you can apply these skills to those outcomes then you'll continue to be gainfully employed in a business context.
I think zero sum applications of software like internal tools with fixed scopes will rapidly be automated away with these tools. By comparison, positive sum product engineering of novel technologies seem like they are still hiring.
Would focus on bridging your technical skills into product engineering and deeply understanding a specific customer domain, invest in EQ through coaching and therapy and continue adopting AI tools to optimize your work.
I don’t get it. Is anyone forcing you to vibe code? If you don’t like vibe coding, don’t do it. The time you save when vibe coding is offset almost 1:1 by the time you need to verify the AI’s output for all but the most trivial applications. And even then, were you happy writing trivial code?
> The time you save when vibe coding is offset almost 1:1 by the time you need to verify the AI’s output
I haven't experienced this at all, especially when you can ask the AI to generate unit tests based off of specs.
I'm manually testing AI output twice as much as if I wrote the code myself, but I'm generating code 10x faster so I'm still gaining massive amounts of productivity.
What language is this and what context?
When the loom came out the people who loved weaving by hand stopped being as valuable.
That's where we are right now. The best bespoke hand-crafted coders are far less valuable than they used to be.
It sucks for the weavers who loved to weave, but this is the consequence of technological progress.
I am starting to find these comparisons bothersome.
It’s not a loom, or a car, or a printing press or python vs punch cards.
It is very different, and the facility “Management” is hoping to replace, is decision-making, and not some predictable mechanical repetitive tasks.
The thing itself is more similar to an idiot savant with no memory or understanding. Getting it to do the right thing is sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult than doing it yourself, and sometimes catastrophic. Letting it on without supervision is almost guaranteed catastrophic.
“Management” trying to replace people with it is a function of perceiving people as cogs.
Not only LLMs, even recorded music and modern ubiquity causes me dread. I play because I enjoy it but it’s not any concrete improvement on the world, and enough music already exists for all needs forever. And AI will eventually generate new random works. It’s a bit depressing I agree, when historically musical talent was needed whenever music wanted to be heard.
> I’m no longer an artisan enjoying the journey of creating
me the first time my boss forced me to unit test my code
...
The best thing you can do is listen to your gut and try to act as rationally as you can.
Talk with trusted mentors if you've got them. Don't listen to me and for the love of god don't listen to people on HN or reddit or Youtube or any other social media.
Nobody knows what they're talking about and they certainly don't know how it'll impact you.
If somebody is making you feel afraid, left behind/out, inferior -- they're trying to sell you shit. Don't listen to the bullies and con artists.
You're entitled to your opinion. If you think AI output is crap, it's crap. Don't be pressured to conform. This is supposed to be hackernews after all. There are plenty of companies using java 8 today. You won't be unhireable.
You’ve got it wrong in the first place!
> The painter finds joy in painting, and the result is valued because
Engineers are not painters in one very fundamental way!
Painter’s product is an asset. Software engineer’s code is a liability.
Painter is an artist, creating art. Its primary purpose is in itself.
Software engineer is a craftsman, he creates a mean to an end. A tool to reach product/business goal.
I got into programming originally because for me it was an act of creation in a very similar way to my sketches and paintings at the time. Software can be art. Interactive art, in fact - so, much 'more' than a painting in some dimensions. Sure, often at work you are creating a means to an end. A painting can be a means to an end in the same way that software can - so many artists take commissions or work for bigger companies where they are told what to produce. I believe it is the purpose/intention behind the creation that makes it art vs a means to an end, not the medium. And some people (in any medium) are able to mix the act of artistic creation with productive output, blending work output and art.
Act of creation of a product for sure, not lines of code.
End product is an asset, not the implementation details. That's the truth, regardless of how you or I feel about it.
That doesn't mean there is no beauty in the craft of writing the code etc. But it's not the key part.
> That doesn't mean there is no beauty in the craft of writing the code etc. But it's not the key part.
For folks who love software, it absolutely is a key part. Donald Knuth titled his book series "The Art of Computer Programming" for a good reason. It taps into the human creative impulse under a compelling set of technical constraints.
Generative AI in any form has the effect of forcing us toward the vanguard, to create something genuinely new or humanly beautiful if it is to be at all valued by others -- whether that novelty/beauty is because of the unique constraints of your company's internal software ecosystem or because you're striking out and building something others haven't built before (even a novel combination of existing ideas).
Novelty is very hard for most people, but perhaps the beauty (in the classical sense) of software projects[0] can still be recovered. Human agency always will be a powerful thing. (And there will always be other people for whom to create things.)
[0] 37Signals has always exhibited a compelling sense of joy in the process of creating beautiful software for people.
> For folks who love software, it absolutely is a key part.
Those are the folks from early days when it was more about math (which is an art) and exploration rather than about actual software _engineering_.
If you're building new algorithms, new computers etc. - yes, your product is the tool itself. But this is a very limited case these days.
Unfortunately many folks drag this attitude in their business software domain and this leads to overengineering and redundant complexity.
With experience you can smell if this part of codebase was mostly made by folks who just like engineering for the sake of it, rather than people trying to reach the business goal in a reasonable time/cost. And this smell is terrible.
I think you may be missing my point. I'm not conflating products and engineering tools, but talking about how art and beauty (as Platonic ideals) can hopefully be preserved or resurrected in the current environment. Engineering "for the sake of it" without a view to business needs does carry pitfalls like you mentioned - that's not what I'm promoting. Leave that to universities and hobby projects (which are very important -- absent wealthy patrons of the arts, the best of culture in a civilization arises from small communities of learning and creative leisure).
But just like an architect designing a beautiful bridge that becomes a landmark, with the right management and product-market fit, it can be possible to profitably build beautiful software products for people. There are real, profitable businesses that do this, and people love their software.
People enjoy and value beautiful things; as a software business culture we ought to value creating them.
LLMs allow me to create more. I get to solve more difficult problems. I get to solve more business problems. I get to create more.
Instead of spending days updating a software package to the latest version, to get the exact same features I already had, I can focus my time prioritizing features and designing the code infrastructure.
but that's not engineering, and people won't get the reward of engineering things. business development is fine and dandy , but for some people is the epitome of boredom
This has nothing to do with AI and the nature of coding going forward. Ask HN has regularly been a depression/burn-out sounding board for years. My final conclusion on it is that there is a large number of people here who have relied on external validation to find happiness. The thing you create, the job you have, the money you make, the role or title you have, the degree - none of these things are internal, all external. This is never sustainable and leads to emotional turbulence.
Same here. I am not able to pull myself to write code - since it is all a “prompt away” - for better or worse.
And when I did use LLMs, I found that they were wasting time by spitting some code that I have to then piece together, troubleshoot or debug.
You do realise that there will be new jobs that AI will produce right?
With abundance coming around the corner for coding, anyone write code, which means software engineers will be needed more than ever.
There will always be new jobs.