Challenge Is Gone

Y_Y

> P.S. I am a human and can make mistakes. The spelling and punctuation in this post were corrected with AI. There's a challenge for you right there. Learn to spell or learn to live with mistakes.

mathgeek

Come join those of us that enjoy solving problems at work but aren’t driven by it. The water is fine, the weather is usually decent, and the existential terror of “failing” goes away eventually. We have the same problems and worries but sleep a bit better when things go wrong.

gassi

> I was only ever interested in engineering challenges. When you pigeonhole yourself into only finding challenge in one field, you're bound to be disappointed eventually. While I do miss some of the challenge, these tools have given me more freedom to tackle difficult problems outside of software, both personally and professionally.

Waterluvian

Yesterday I turned 40 and reflected on the same thing. For most of my life the “main quest” was always obvious. I went to school, found my soul mate, got married, bought a house, had kids, paid off the mortgage, got yelled at by Howie Mandel, won the awards, achieved my career goals. But now there’s no main quest. It’s just a whole wonderful, brilliantly rendered world of side quests for me to pick from. I’m spoiled with choice… The thing is… main quests drive you, but you have to drive the side quests; they’re perfectly content to not get done. It’s an adjustment, and I’m optimistic that I’ll overcome it. But I’m currently trapped in the doldrums of figuring out what to do between now and when the credits roll.

zebomon

I was glad to see the direction this essay took. I agree with you: it's the old challenges that are gone and there's a whole new class of challenges (the former impossibilities) in front of us.

simias

I am roughly the same age and I grapple with many of the same ideas, although I'm still pretty depressed at this point. I've been coding for 25 years, I'm quite good at it, it's a facet of my personality. Seeing this skillset commoditized within a year or so has been a brutal experience. Payback for all the jobs we replaced with software, I suppose. I do feel like I should be thankful to be alive right now though. I witnessed the evolution from Kirby on the Game Boy to Half Life 2 to VR to LLMs. The tools we use today were science fiction only a few years ago. I just wish society was in a better state to make this tech a greater good instead of a tool for advertisement, warfare and wealth concentration. I feel a deep sense of loss because of this. 20 years ago I had no doubt that technological progress was an obviously good thing, that it would improve the lives of everyone. Do I still believe this? I'd like to, at least.

gspr

> I simply know that I can solve any engineering problem (that I can come up with) with the help of artificial intelligence. I'm sorry, but I find this a bit silly. Either: * your imagination is extremely limited (which is OK, no worries!), and the statement is true because of that, or * your imagination is fine and the statement is just false, or * your imagination is fine and the statement is true, in which case: what's stopping you? We all agree that there are engineering challenges, the solution to which would make the world a better place (or make you fabulously wealthy, whatever floats your boat), so get cracking if it's so easy now! Which is it?

didgeoridoo

I don’t know man, a lot of shit I try still doesn’t work. Maybe the challenge has relocated from doing the right thing to asking the right questions and knowing what the right answer looks like — but it’s definitely not “gone”.

whyage

You write well , why not challenge yourself to write a book? Assuming you didn't use AI for more than spelling

spamizbad

> I simply know that I can solve any engineering problem (that I can come up with) with the help of artificial intelligence. I've tried it a few times — it works. I think you just need to push yourself to do harder problems. For me, I pushed pretty aggressively into the hardware space, building things as a hobby that I originally felt would be far too time-consuming. This is an area where AI can certainly help accelerate but asking it to make small changes can be an expensive (token wise) proposition, so it forces you think through all the critical decisions and research up-front, and let AI do the boring scut-work.

28304283409234

Your next challenge is to finds a next challenge.

thin_carapace

understanding of the unconscious would be entirely novel , yet such knowledge is overtly claimed here. if the author is human he may be showing signs of ai psycosis.

usermac

Ai helps me build better, more deterministic outcomes that it itself can't. I mean I'm building a mailing list manager that blends names of couples. Yes, AI can do this but it's inconsistent. I can direct AI to code precise outcomes step-by-step. Coding is solved? Not sure, but my directing code is solved.

Arodex

The author says he vibe-coded a book translation website, and there is no challenge. Anyone who has translated a book, a literature one, knows it isn't something that is well done by AI.

armchairhacker

All challenge is gone? No way. Your next challenge is to find a new one. LLMs make what was formerly hard trivial, that is true. But they cannot do everything with simple prompts, you must increase your ambition to what was formerly impossible. Try building a bigger game, more complicated software or hardware…what have you always wanted but written off as something only a multi-millionaire with a large team of domain experts could accomplish? Because you have one now.

mpalmer

Challenge is never gone. Here's a challenge: see yourself from the outside. Realize that however effective you are as a programmer now, you were once a hopeless beginner. Then you must acknowledge that you are still a hopeless beginner, relative to the you that doesn't exist yet. In the spirit of fellowship, I tell you: git gud --- And as you continue to learn, you'll see this for yourself, but I guarantee to you now that AI opened paths to writing novel software which no one has noticed yet. Software that was possible before but perhaps annoying to build, etc. Software which perhaps will only ever be imagined by someone who learned exactly the things you have, in exactly the order you did. Never make the mistake that AI knows how to do everything just because it knows how to do everything we've done so far. And don't think of your work as "mining" engineering problems! Forget engineering problems. Find a human problem and think about it for an entire month.

kannanvijayan

My personal emotional reaction to these changes is very similar, as a 40-something year old programmer. I wrote my own take on it ( https://medium.com/@kannanvijayan/talking-to-the-computer-5c... ), didn't submit it to HN though. I was genuinely considering whether or not I still liked programming - the excitement and risk of technical failure had dropped off. Most failures were for other organizational and process and management reasons. I respect the value of executing those aspects well, but I have no interest in becoming fluent in solving that class of problems. It just bores me. I want to build big beautiful, complex, intricate machines. The agentic tools are, for me, a step up into tackling broader projects I had put on the shelf as "not doable without investment". I can self-fund my ideas now. Things I anticipate would have taken about a decade or so to play around with and build out as a sole developer, I'm taking on as a sole developer. But that said, I do appreciate that we can't be sure of what exactly this churn will produce. The other factors that go along with the technical achievement aren't too rosy.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN

I think there's still challenges. The main one I see is the question of how we can use an LLM as humans to produce something harder than the LLM can by itself. I like to think of it with an analogy. Suppose I was granted the privilege of having a world renowned human expert as my personal assistant, but she had no initiative of her own. How could I collaborate with her? I would definitely need to keep learning more to understand what she says. I would also need tools to augment my ability to follow along and she would need tools to bring knowledge down to my level of understanding. One might argue humans are unnecessary in the above process, but I think that's just failing the challenge of keeping up. So I try

hbcdbff

Being a SWE is now a mix of being a PM and reviewing vibecoded slop all day

bob1029

I've tried a few things that I know are possible (multiplayer FPS with client-side prediction), but the overall challenge still persists. There is no easy way to rapidly iterate this architecture with an agent unless you already have massively deep pools of experience to draw from. Launching this system into the real world is even more challenging than building it. For many problems, the LLMs look like they might be making progress, but once you zoom out far enough you realize it's just pushing the toothpaste around in the same tube with the cap still on. The mass of the overall system is not changing despite the appearance of localized progress. If your primary source of identity was gatekeeping the Pantone colors of the various office furniture, then yes perhaps the challenge is now gone. But, if you were focused on mission and 'big picture' ( what furniture and why ), it's plausible that the challenge could actually increase in its intensity.