I never found the act of coding something profound. LLMs are just tools, like sed, awk, or xargs, albeit with more range.
So no, I don’t miss the days of dealing with some douchebag on Stack Overflow or some neckbeard on a random subreddit telling me to pick up different career. They can now die in peace with their “hard-earned KnOwleDgE.”
Fiddling with directory structures or bike shedding over linter configs never felt artistic to me. It just felt like getting overly poetic about doing bullshit. LLMs and agents are amazing at doing these grunt work.
I get that some folks see the hand of God in their dotfiles or get high off Lisp’s homoiconicity, but most folks don’t relate to that. I just wanna do my build stuff and have fun with the results—not get romantic about the grind. I’m glad LLMs made all my man page knowledge useless if it means I can do more in less time and spend that time on things I actually enjoy.
I used to feel similar when I’d write Python. It was a beautiful language in its primordial days, and you’d feel like a hipster renegade if you could sneak it into an enterprise environment where C#, Java, and C++ were the norms. Even just whipping up a tiny script that didn’t require compilation and could do some stuff felt like magic.
These days I mostly write Go for work, and as I’ve gotten older, I no longer find the act of programming profound. I take more joy in hiking and kayaking than programming, since LLMs have commoditized something that used to be gatekept to the teeth.
I’m glad that AI tools have trivialized many parts of the act and let people focus on the result rather than the process. Kind of like how good linters completely killed off the bike shedding around code aesthetics.
That said, nowadays I appreciate tools that last. Languages that take backward compatibility seriously and don’t break user code on a whim. Languages that don’t support ten ways of doing the same thing. Languages that don’t require any external dependency managers or build tools. Languages that are fast, have less syntactic noise, and let me do my stuff without much fuss. So to my eyes, those useful languages are the most beautiful.
So Python, with its bolted-on type system, no built-in dependency manager (uv doesn’t count; there will be more unless they put it in the standard toolchain), and a terrible type checker, doesn’t really appeal to me anymore.
I’m sure anyone could write a beautiful ode to any language of their choice and make something profound out of it. If I could, I’d probably write an ode to Go.
> since LLMs have commoditized something that used to be gatekept to the teeth.
I don't see any LLM commoditization and I can't apprehend your point of view that programming was guarded by gatekeepers. The past 20 years have been an explosion of systems, open code, and languages. Where do you get this point of view from?
That is the mindset that the industry has drilled into programmers from 2015-2024 (everyone must learn how to code).
This worked for OSS corporate employees who pretended to promote equity while always keeping their own leadership positions.
Since the layoffs, corporations stole all open source code via "AI" and are now selling it back to the authors while humiliating them ("you have been gatekeeping!").
Totalitarian projects like CPython, whose "leaders" jumped on any corporate bandwagon and have yelled "gatekeeping" on any occasion, are now guarding the leftover places and the GitHub lock icons have increased exponentially (many of them have been fired).
As you say, all of this is just self-serving propaganda and there has never been any real gatekeeping in programming. especially when compared to law or medicine.
A large part of these anthropomorphic narratives was pushed by SV nerds to grab shareholder attention.
LLMs are transformative, but a lot of the tools around them already treat them as opaque function calls. Instead of piping text to sed, awk, or xargs, we’re just piping streams to these functions. This analogy can stretch to cover audio and video usage too. But that’s boring and doesn’t explain why you suddenly have to pay more for Google Work Suite just to get bombarded by AI slop.
This isn’t to undermine the absolutely incredible achievements of the people building this tech. It’s to point out the absurdity of the sales pitch from investors and benefactors.
But we’ve always been like this. Each new technology promises the world, and many even manage to deliver. Or is it that they succeed only because they overpromise and draw massive attention and investment in the first place? IDK, we’ll see.
That got me thinking - what if we stripped that conversational sound-like-a-human-be-safe layer and focused RLHF on being best at transforming text for API usages?
The early OpenAI Instruct models were more like that. The original GPT-3 was only trained to predict the next token, then they used RLHF to make them interpret everything as queries, so that "Explain the theory of gravity to a 6 year old." wouldn't complete to "Explain the theory of relativity to a 6 year old in a few sentences." ChatGPT was probably that, expanded to multi-turn conversation. You can see the beginnings of that ChatGPT style in those examples.
If you don’t aim for the moon, you’re gonna surely miss it. The number of orbital calculations you need to get right to land on the moon is bonkers /s.
If either of you did, you'd know it's false. Getting to the Moon (and back) by eyeballing the trajectory is a rite of passage for every KSP player.
You launch for standard equatorial low orbit, then coast until the Moon is about 90 degrees to the right / behind you, and burn ahead until you run out of fuel in the second stage. This turns your orbit into an elongated ellipse, and as you get close to its far end, the Moon will catch up and capture you in its gravity well.
When playing one of the non-sandbox aka. "progression" modes, i.e. "career" or "science", the trajectory planning tools are locked behind an expensive upgrade, effectively forcing you to do your first Moon fly-by this way.
JS is a terrible language to begin with, and bringing it to the backend was a mistake. TS doesn’t change the fact that the underlying language is still a pile of crap.
So, like many, I’ll write anything—Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, Elixir, F#—before touching JS or TS with a ten-foot pole.
It's 2025, Node.js has been around since 2009, yet these languages' still use C-based interpreters by default, and their non-standard JIT alternatives are still much worse than V8.
Define “worse.” V8 is a runtime; it can’t fix JavaScript’s terrible design. V8 is amazing but runs a crappy language. Both Ruby and Python were created by actual language designers, and that still shows even decades after their original conception.
Python is basically the only language that’s used to train the models.
Sure, the libs are mostly written in C/C++, but all of them have first-class support for Python and oftentimes Python only. Serving the model is a different story and you can use whatever language to do so.
As someone who has worked in the DS realm for an extended period of time, I can tell you Python has practically zero competition when it comes to data wrangling and training models. There are plenty of contenders when it comes to serving the models or building “agents.”
As for type checking, yeah, it sucks big time. TS is a much better type system than the bolted-on hints in Python. But it’s still JS at the end of the day. All the power of V8, a zillion other runtimes, and TS gets marred by a terribly designed language.
Not every post about Go needs to mention Rust. Rust has its niche and so does Go. Both kind of suck at AI.
LLM researchers care about neither since Rust comes with its own headache: learning curve, slow compilation, weak stdlib, and Go’s FFI story is just sad. It’s still Python or GTFO.
That said, Go is great to whip up “agents” since it’s a nicer language to write networking and glue code, which is what agents are. Other than a few niche groups, I’ve seen a lot more agents written in Go than in Rust.
A lot of people who are wary of LLMs aren’t against the technology itself, but rather the narrative surrounding it. You can take advantage of the tool while turning a blind eye to the discourse.
This 16-minute, expletive-filled, edgy-old-man-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool article could easily be dismissed as yet another AI creed that somehow found its way to the top of the HN front page.
I've been maintaining my tiny corner[^1] of the internet for around six years and the lack of readers never bothered me that much; nor did the influx of LLMs. I write when I feel like it, when I have something to say, or when I think it's something my past self would read. Sure, there have been times when some of the articles hit the front page of Hacker News but most of what I write gets little attention and that's perfectly okay.
Some of my least favourite write-ups on my blog have thousands of views, and conversely many of my most favourite ones rarely got any. Chasing views and writing stuff that has any substance beyond HN rage bait are completely two different things.
> Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor
Possibly, though the context strongly suggests someone discovering Cursor. It's also possible that someone shared their account with him and that could explain the "30-minute thinking time" (the free slow requests).
So no, I don’t miss the days of dealing with some douchebag on Stack Overflow or some neckbeard on a random subreddit telling me to pick up different career. They can now die in peace with their “hard-earned KnOwleDgE.”
Fiddling with directory structures or bike shedding over linter configs never felt artistic to me. It just felt like getting overly poetic about doing bullshit. LLMs and agents are amazing at doing these grunt work.
I get that some folks see the hand of God in their dotfiles or get high off Lisp’s homoiconicity, but most folks don’t relate to that. I just wanna do my build stuff and have fun with the results—not get romantic about the grind. I’m glad LLMs made all my man page knowledge useless if it means I can do more in less time and spend that time on things I actually enjoy.
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