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

guywithahat

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.

sgbeal

> 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 ;).

shivapb80

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.

dude250711

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

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

>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

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.

squalvj

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

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

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

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.

gottagocode

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

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

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

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 here 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.

hebetude

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

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

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.

jplusequalt

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

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.