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Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

44•sph•45m ago
I can close an eye on using LLMs for research only.

These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all. I’d honestly switch careers rather than manage agents. But I’m currently out of work (contract ended) and wondering if there is still a sane place to work, or is it truly time to pivot to another career.

Comments

guywithahat•33m ago
Dow/classified projects can still be pretty old school. Our company hasn’t really done much on the AI front yet although I’m pushing hard to change that.
ActionHank•30m ago
I am deeply envious that you have dodged the slop trenches and get to walk into a somewhat cleaner solution.

The rest of us have to clean up and maintain the slop and it's depressing as hell.

alexjplant•4m ago
[delayed]
hhh•28m ago
on the other hand cyberespionage has changed drastically
sgbeal•31m ago
> These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all.

If you mean using a text editor, a shell, and a makefile, then you're not alone by any stretch of the imagination.

If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).

Aachen•12m ago
It's 2026. It hasn't been 10+ years
sgbeal•2m ago
> It hasn't been 10+ years

:-?

My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.

graemep•9m ago
> If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).

Unfortunately, definitely not. There are lots of people still doing the same as they did a decade ago who have learned very little. Very often the people who knew very little to start with.

shivapb80•30m ago
I do not have an answer to your original question but I do have a comment that I have realized it myself quite recently. May be the analogy is not good enough but here it goes: no one would go back to punch cards etc, we have come a long way. And GenAI is such a tool - there is no going back.
lolakutty•27m ago
Yea, it is easier to use an LLM for search than using a conventional search engine. No one is going back to that if a non-malicious LLM is available at reasonable costs.
robin_reala•19m ago
The real costs are externalised to society and the environment. I assume you weren’t including that in your “reasonable costs”.
compiler-devel•2m ago
Nobody really cares about externalized costs. If they did, then cars, electricity, lithium batteries, etc wouldn't be as popular as they are.
dude250711•30m ago
There are some "boring" enterprises that "lag behind" (subjective) the alleged trend. It just needs to have a sceptical independently-thinking CTO I guess. Which kind of goes against the typical people filling such roles.
cowanon77•28m ago
We still have some product development software teams at my company that have not changed at all in the last year. We develop medical products in the U.S., so it is heavily regulated and processes change very slowly. We also require reviews from our legal team, so it takes a while for any new contract or agreement to be approved.

This is temporary though; other teams are fully embracing AI in their processes, and it's really only a matter of time until all teams use it. We have C-suite instructions to promote AI adoption. AI will slowly creep into software testing, verification, and eventually the requirements management and software development itself. I'm working on some of the pilot projects.

lolakutty•28m ago
>I can close an eye on using LLMs for research only.

Yes, this is the only way I use them. As a better search tool for the collective knowledge, and to do arbitrary queries on a complicated code base.

If there are any mechanical changes, like renaming something or such, I might use an LLM for it as well.

andreybaskov•23m ago
I’ve learned for myself that I need to write code just to keep my brain in shape - same as going to the gym to be healthy.

Even though agents are building all of my code now, I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem. There is no practical use, but it make me feel good and sharp for the rest of the day.

For anyone coping with AI I suggest to give it a try, and stick to it for some time, just like with a gym.

kilroy123•22m ago
Smart. I've been thinking about doing the same.

I regret not doing this 10 years ago. Just ~20 minutes of leetcode practice for a decade. I could have landed so much better gigs. :-/

mysterydip•3m ago
As the saying goes, “the best time to start would have been 10 years ago. The second best time is today”
mattm•15m ago
I've settled on writing my own code for about 30-60 minutes per day. One benefit I've noticed is that it helps me be a bit more critical and questioning of decisions made in the code as compared to just doing code review of the LLM's output. I think this ends up being a nice balance.
gottagocode•10m ago
I think this is a really good idea; I usually do this for about a month until I tell myself my time is better spent building or playing something that I don't have to convince myself that I truly enjoy.
squalvj•21m ago
In my company they give each one claude code.

The transition of winning an argument change to “claude said…” which are fucking annoying facing this shit in daily basis.

Code base becoming a blackbox where god and AI know what its like, every function have 4 line of paragraph historically describing changes from past to the future.

Im thinking of resigning because i cant bear this shit anymore but seems like its not better in other place.

Its time for me to retire and change career IG. Im sick of this becoming middleman between my manager and the AI

leftnode•19m ago
I use Codex extensively, but mostly as a sounding board for architectural questions. I'll also have it do a lot of boilerplate work, but damn, I don't get these people creating multiple Claude or Codex accounts to burn tokens all day. I still love writing code!
nickphx•19m ago
I ended a 10 year contract when the new clownshoes CTO started hyping the slop. I would rather stare at a wall than 'manage' an 'agentic team'.
vermilingua•19m ago
I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me).

I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.

hebetude•15m ago
Being unwilling to change or changing too much are both equally going to get you fired. I’m the later so I feel your pain. At companies you have to turn your brain off and bahhh with the sheep.
cracell•7m ago
Regardless of if a new tool is useful or not, if it’s being pushed internally then embrace it.

If it’s not useful now you have authority on why. And if it’s not is useful then you are better at your job.

csbrooks•3m ago
Seems to me you at least have to try using them, so you can make a coherent case why you work just as well or better without them.
gottagocode•18m ago
I am a lead developer working in Cyber Security. We are just now integrating co-pilot reviews into our pipeline to help speed along the initial review process and weed out any surface level bugs. We still have no agentic coding, and I'm not sure we will for at least another year. I have advocated to modernize and keep up with modern tooling to no avail.
dd8601fn•18m ago
There are so, so many. You just generally won’t hear about it here.

Where I work, I have chores than a claude subscription would knock out in minutes instead of months. But I don’t have permission to run something like that, so I don’t.

Weirdly our contractors can. They wrote it into their contracts. It’s not even fair, really.

They say they’re working on it, but some people might be pushing back.

frnx•16m ago
Yeah, as much as I can.

I like building and tweaking computer stuff, and managing agents is a completely different carrer than the one I signed up for. I guess corporate interests fell out of alignment with me with this one, definitely thinking about my career more these days.

coldpie•15m ago
I work at a significant computer security software vendor with 5-digits of employees. They provide AI tooling and training and encourage people to use it, but it's not like "use this or we will fire you and kill your children" like you hear from other companies. I use it a couple times a week, mostly for code review and sometimes boring boilerplate-type tasks, but it hasn't been a major overhaul in how I work. People who obviously outsource their brain to the AI get negative reactions to that behavior.

If the company does try to turn the screws and force me to use it more, I'd rather exit the company (and maybe the industry entirely) than become a slop slinger. We'll see how it goes, but for now at least, I think this company has been handling it well.

dotdi•14m ago
I'm not coding like 2021, but I'm debugging customer issues like 2021.

I work on a product that is, in most cases, self-hosted by customers and is operating in a very regulated field. I'm in charge of a large part of the technical decisions and this includes scalability.

Debugging customer problems, especially around issues under load, weird spikes, networking weirdness and the likes really hasn't been improved by talking to LLMs. I do occasionally braindump into Claude to get some inspiration (ie research), but it's been limited in utility. I have to deal with customers sending me complete chat transcripts with ChatGPT, and this wastes much more time than it saves.

I suspect this has to do with the fact that we're dealing with relatively niche, non-mainstream problems usually. If you google something and you don't come up with much, chances are your LLM training body might also not cover the subject in great detail.

hebetude•14m ago
Interviews require you to code without any LLM help. 9/10 require this still. Once inside, I don’t think they write any code themselves.
QuadmasterXLII•12m ago
Every four months or so we try getting hyped on agents for ~ a week. Up to this point the answer has always been a pretty solid "nope this sucks back to manual code." The agentically coded parts of the codebase that came from these trials are palpably more annoying than the rest. However, the current trial is going better than the last ones have (Fable 5.1 really is astonishing). On the other hand, each other trial started with a honeymoon so it's up in the air.
localhoster•12m ago
I have said it in some prev threads but the majority of my workplaces code is written by ai today, and it's not looking good.

All implemention decisions are largely decided by claude these days.

We have so many useless tests, so many repetitive code, Every change, even few lines long will trigger 25-50 additional files changes just because everything is so horribly written.

I have heard this was the case before ai, but it got so much worse.

At the end, I believe it comes down to 3 things: care - which before ai you had to have at least some care. Strong leadership - the ai psychosis spreads like a desease in our csuite. Ownership - there is none, every interaction you have about something starts with "but claude thinks that or says this"

I wish we could go back.

bravetraveler•10m ago
Happily writing automation like it's 2016; pulling from the exact same library, solving the same problems, for different companies. I've tried to be left behind, and yet...

Where? I'll say this much: we sell some of the shovels.

jplusequalt•7m ago
Graphics programmer who still codes by hand here. I use LLMs for search, and for rubber ducking. I would not disrespect the years I've put into this craft by outsourcing my thinking. Nor do I want to wake up in ten years and realize I have willingly made myself stupid through overuse of these tools.
mysterydip•5m ago
The code we write here is all human-generated. There’s been an initiative to explore LLM usage. So far it’s been in a reviewer role only, as in “here’s some things I found that you could fix”, and then humans discuss each one and determine if it’s valid and how to fix it.

Also one of my domains is in microcontrollers and using specific hardware that needs bit-banging drivers written for, so it’s unlikely any LLM has enough data to write those things itself.

jolt42•3m ago
It's now like coding using the socratic method. Knowing the right questions is now the hard part. And you need to know the context to ask the right questions. Yes, I'm not typing in as much code or reading as much code directly, but still figuring out how to produce a good solution.
voakbasda•3m ago
I am working on an embedded device where AI coding has been contractually prohibited. I use it for learning about APIs and modern tools, but all of the code comes from my brain. The reason is that the issue of AI copyrights has not been resolved, and this product will be sold to parts of the government that care.

That said, their stance has been wavering, given the apparent inevitability that AI-washing of copyrighted works will be rubber stamped. As you say, damn near everyone has now embraced AI and infected their products with their output. The economic shock if this practice was found illegal would crater the stock market, so of course it will be made legal (at least for the big US models whose corps have been spending their lobbying dollars wisely).

Once the outcome becomes sufficiently clear, I expect the tide will turn, and I am not entirely sad about it. I would like to give them a spin for creating one-off tools, running security audits, tackling certain refactoring, analyze log files, and perform other adjacent tasks. But if I have my way, I will never delegate the core tasks of architecture, design, and development.

I can only say that because I am operating as an independent contractor, so I have a little agency to decide what I do.

mikemarsh•3m ago
Thus far I still am, but I'm in a very weird and atypical work situation at the moment.

Weirdness aside, I'm continuing to write code as I used to, despite the overall company _cultural_ push towards AI, given the lack of direct orders, and pray my output is good enough that the "powers that be" leave me alone.

I am also in the job search process, and am also still noticing plenty of listings that don't mention AI.

brynet•1m ago
I don't use LLMs, because I don't need (or want) the rubber duck to talk back.
jplusequalt•9m ago
>I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem.

Keeping with your example, this is the equivalent of going to the gym just to do a single set on the bench press.

Your brain is still atrophying.

cyberpunk•6m ago
Sure about that? The effort put into a leetcode medium or hard is usually way above the kind of code i’m mostly doing at work — and realistically i only have at most 2 hours a day of that level of work in me, the rest is the autopilot code, reviews meetings, docs etc.

I’ve found aoc/leetcode pretty much reversed the accidental atrophy for me