I was lost, literally, hitchhiking across the Australian outback when this article was published. Going home felt scary because I was afraid to be alone with no one else sharing my interests. Travelling made life enjoyable again because just surviving felt like an achievement. But I felt so, so isolated (again, literally!) from modern society. I wanted to find out why I was so deeply interested in computers but not in “tech”. They must work somehow… why did my iPhone (sold that) feel similar to my PC (sold that too) but only one is called a computer? This article framed things in a way that shook me out of a physically dangerous, homeless, jobless rut. It was all code. And I could learn it if I had the time.
Perhaps it was the way it was written; I couldn’t believe intrigue and passion of computing could be weaved together like this. But there it was.
I did make it home eventually. Fortunately the first 2000km lift back from western Australia to the eastern states with a crystal meth addict on the run from the police didn’t end violently. A few weeks back in Sydney with family some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now. I guess I should print this article out to show to my kids!
Haha thanks for saying that. It’s real! It’s relatively easy to get into the middle of nowhere in Australia after all ;) Actually still haven’t published my journal scribblings on my blog 10 years on..
>some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now
There is a gap between receptionist and official software engineer. Please, give us more details about your journey and what happened in between
> There is a gap between receptionist and official software engineer.
At many companies (especially old, stodgy companies) this gap is artificial. The day you get asked "hey, I've got some data .... and I need ..." and you successfully solve the person's problem, is the day you become the office's live-in software engineer. That person you helped will be back, and they will bring friends.
Not sure what country you live in, but where I live, a receptionist doesn't have access to any data processing tools that are not within the realm of a receptionist, and therefore this mobility does not happen. The receptionist ends up redirect the query to someone who has access to the relevant systems.
What sort of companies are those were receptionists have access to tools beyond their role? and why are people approaching the receptionists asking for data queries?
Like having to run a script on that data when your machine doesn't have the permissions to run arbitrary software without permission from the IT team
You're still thinking too much in a "tech company" mindset. At the kind of company I'm talking about, concepts like "access" and "permissions" are irrelevant. Most of the company's employees barely know how a computer works.
You seemed vaguely tech savvy, so someone asked you for help and emailed you a file containing the data (or perhaps just handed you a laptop and turned you loose). The rest is history.
It's a modern invention that companies have separate software engineering orgs, software engineering roadmaps, software engineering managers. At older companies, a software developer is just another businessperson in a cubicle. Your manager probably has an English degree.
> You seemed vaguely tech savvy, so someone asked you for help and emailed you a file containing the data (or perhaps just handed you a laptop and turned you loose). The rest is history.
I know that someday I'll work in something other than IT. When I do I am going to make for damned sure that I don't express even the slightest bit of tech savvy for exactly this reason.
It's similar to playing dumb w/ people I encounter outside work who find out I work in IT. If I get asked a question I play dumb and cop to working on some highly siloed subject (usually I'll claim to only work on "networking" or firewalls... >smile<).
The first job I had where I did anything technical (basic JS and HTML) also had me cold calling, answering phones, designing brochures, fiberglass repair, and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Small businesses frequently have more niche jobs than people and are more than happy to have people help where they are interested.
My first full software job was a direct to consumer company, and during the Christmas rush the entire front office was on the packing line.
Larger companies tend to appreciate people staying in their lane.
>receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in
They were also converting paper records to digital. Asking the data entry person where the data is or how to find paper record xyz in the digital system doesn't seem odd.
In a small business, the receptionist may be responsible for inputting much of that data in the first place, and it may just live on the receptionist's computer.
In fact in some companies outside of tech proper with smaller headcount and less technically minded management, by the time the boss decides to look into systems like HRIS, CRM, ERM, and such the receptionist, office manager, and/or the interns already have about 837 Excel macros doing most of that work.
Microsoft Excel is the #1 tool at the top of that rather narrowly envisioned slippery slope, since you ask. Followed by any web browser.
As for data access; the vast majority of firms, worldwide, in every country, have abysmal internal controls, and in many cases, none at all. The filing cabinet is unlocked all day, everything from payroll to posters is in a share that every network login can R/W, and nobody cares.
Particularly those of us who don't have computer science training kind of end up falling into this stuff.
One of my first jobs was as an admin assistant at a utilities company. We logged data about pipe replacement, which was done in something like five different spreadsheets, each optimized for its printed form (legal requirements for paper copies of various things). I knew just about enough about Access to know that entering the same thing in 5 different spreadsheets is a waste of everyone's time so set up a database where people entered the information once and Access forms generated the five printable versions. Management were impressed and asked me what else I think might be possible. Cue me diving into the world of complex forms, eventually VBA, then once I got frustrated with that, VB.NET via SharpDevelop (they sure as hell weren't paying for Visual Studio), on and on. I was doing software engineering while still keeping the job title of admin assistant.
...then I went and got a real engineering job with a real salary.
Reminds me of this discussion between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey on this site 9 years ago. Rich Hickey always asserted that code is data (which aligns with the LISP view of the world), Alan Kay thinks that’s a bad idea.
> The thing that is remarkable about it is that it has this property of being information—that we made it up—but it is also machine, and it has these engineered properties. And this is where software is unlikely anything we have ever done, and we're still grappling on that that means. What does it mean to have information that functions as machine? It's got this duality: you can see it as both.
> We suffer -- tremendously -- from a bias from traditional engineering that writing code is like digging a ditch: that it is a mundane activity best left to day labor -- and certainly beneath the Gentleman Engineer. This belief is profoundly wrong because software is not like a dam or a superhighway or a power plant: in software, the blueprints _are_ the thing; the abstraction _is_ the machine.
A Paul Ford masterpiece. I loved this so much when it came out, I split the article into a bunch of tweets and had a bot repost them every hour. rip, https://twitter.com/whatiscode
You can say fucking here, one, we're all adults, two, there's no algorithms on HN penalising you (and if they were they'd penalise you anyway because it's not 1995 anymore), and three, it's almost insulting to believe replacing a letter with a star will make a word unrecognisable.
That said, this is why I like HN or any other kind of curated website, the voting systems and comments and the like will (hopefully) make sure low-effort writing will be filtered out.
Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship & doesn't even bother to even look at the code being produced anymore. Just today, I implemented 2 features using Cursor & GPT-5.1 Codex-Max & I didn't have to write a single line of code myself. But it felt wrong. It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".
Same, I got so much fomo from reading the gas town post I think you’re alluding too. Someone else can link it but it’s not “worth the read” in the way this was communicates so many ideas and captures/distills the zeitgeist of that time.
I guess the gas town one does capture our moment, but embracing YOLO spaghetti-o with reckless abandon, is a) depressing, even though I also feel like a middling programmer and b) actually seems to be dazzling these newer beleaguered bureaucrats precisely because they think they could just talk to the LLM instead of TMitTB.
Anyway, if that post and its ilk leave a bad taste, this was mouthwash for me. Lucky 10,000 I know, but I had never seen this (or felt so seen, as they say). I had to go check that he wasn’t wrong about PHP being Personal Home Page. I somehow never picked up that the recursive naming thing is a backcroynm.
I used to think this, until I tried it. Now I see that it effectively removes all the tedium while still letting you have whatever level of creative control you want over the output.
Just imagine that instead of having to work off of an amorphous draft in your head, it really creates the draft right in front of you in actual code. You can still shape and craft and refine it just the same, but now you have tons more working memory free to use for the actually meaningful parts of the problem.
And, you're way less burdened by analysis paralysis. Instead of running in circles thinking about how you want to implement something, you can just try it both ways. There's no sunk cost of picking the wrong approach because it's practically instantaneous.
Sure, and that goes even for myself. Like for example, on some projects maybe I'll be more interested in exploring a particular architectural choice than actually focusing on the details of the feature. It ultimately doesn't matter, the point is that you can choose where to spend your attention, instead of being forced to always go through all the motions even for things that are just irrelevant boilerplate
Fortunately, at least in Europe, there are definitely companies still around who either don't force the usage of slop machines or even have a culture of rejecting them completely (yes, that's a thing, and I'm glad to be working at such a company).
> It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".
It feels different if you replace "LLM" with "outsourcing". Thing is, instructing a team of software engineers what you want is a lot more work (they need a lot more handholding), a lot more expensive, and a lot slower. But I'd argue that the work is the same - writing specifications, adjusting accordingly. Minus the human factor.
LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job, but it will affect outsourcing and agencies as an industry. Of course, outsourcing companies will / are using it too.
The difference is that before nobody forced you to be the manager of outsourced team, either you're fired or you're still working with code. Now you'll be expected to generate everything and oversee 10 agents.
>LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job
They won't same as the industrial revolution didn't kill farming as a job but it sure did ate up most of the farming roles. Most of the people you have ever met are people who would have been farmers had they been born before the revolution. Developers without much leverage, underpaid, overworked and competing with hundreds of experienced devs for a single role is likely to be the eventual future of most software development thus gradually becoming similar to other stem roles in terms of pay, competition and negotiation power.
Why not just let the product manager use some no-code tool?
I think software engineers are having an identity disconnect from their roles as engineers vs coders. Engineering is about solving problems via tools and knowledge through constraints. An engineer is not diminished by having other engineers or better tooling as assistants. If you are having problems understanding your role in the problem, frankly you need to review your skillset and adjust.
You are correct in the abstract, but concretely I contest how useful LLMs are for producing software. I don't doubt their usefulness in prototyping or, say, writing web apps, but I truly do not think they are revolutionary for me, or for software development as a whole.
I was lost, literally, hitchhiking across the Australian outback when this article was published. Going home felt scary because I was afraid to be alone with no one else sharing my interests. Travelling made life enjoyable again because just surviving felt like an achievement. But I felt so, so isolated (again, literally!) from modern society. I wanted to find out why I was so deeply interested in computers but not in “tech”. They must work somehow… why did my iPhone (sold that) feel similar to my PC (sold that too) but only one is called a computer? This article framed things in a way that shook me out of a physically dangerous, homeless, jobless rut. It was all code. And I could learn it if I had the time.
Perhaps it was the way it was written; I couldn’t believe intrigue and passion of computing could be weaved together like this. But there it was.
I did make it home eventually. Fortunately the first 2000km lift back from western Australia to the eastern states with a crystal meth addict on the run from the police didn’t end violently. A few weeks back in Sydney with family some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now. I guess I should print this article out to show to my kids!
This story is "best comments" material. It would be even if it were a fabulist tale. Thanks for sharing!
Haha thanks for saying that. It’s real! It’s relatively easy to get into the middle of nowhere in Australia after all ;) Actually still haven’t published my journal scribblings on my blog 10 years on..
>some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now
There is a gap between receptionist and official software engineer. Please, give us more details about your journey and what happened in between
> There is a gap between receptionist and official software engineer.
At many companies (especially old, stodgy companies) this gap is artificial. The day you get asked "hey, I've got some data .... and I need ..." and you successfully solve the person's problem, is the day you become the office's live-in software engineer. That person you helped will be back, and they will bring friends.
The rest after that is just job title shuffling.
Not sure what country you live in, but where I live, a receptionist doesn't have access to any data processing tools that are not within the realm of a receptionist, and therefore this mobility does not happen. The receptionist ends up redirect the query to someone who has access to the relevant systems.
What sort of companies are those were receptionists have access to tools beyond their role? and why are people approaching the receptionists asking for data queries?
Like having to run a script on that data when your machine doesn't have the permissions to run arbitrary software without permission from the IT team
You're still thinking too much in a "tech company" mindset. At the kind of company I'm talking about, concepts like "access" and "permissions" are irrelevant. Most of the company's employees barely know how a computer works.
You seemed vaguely tech savvy, so someone asked you for help and emailed you a file containing the data (or perhaps just handed you a laptop and turned you loose). The rest is history.
It's a modern invention that companies have separate software engineering orgs, software engineering roadmaps, software engineering managers. At older companies, a software developer is just another businessperson in a cubicle. Your manager probably has an English degree.
> You seemed vaguely tech savvy, so someone asked you for help and emailed you a file containing the data (or perhaps just handed you a laptop and turned you loose). The rest is history.
I know that someday I'll work in something other than IT. When I do I am going to make for damned sure that I don't express even the slightest bit of tech savvy for exactly this reason.
It's similar to playing dumb w/ people I encounter outside work who find out I work in IT. If I get asked a question I play dumb and cop to working on some highly siloed subject (usually I'll claim to only work on "networking" or firewalls... >smile<).
Many small business.
The first job I had where I did anything technical (basic JS and HTML) also had me cold calling, answering phones, designing brochures, fiberglass repair, and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Small businesses frequently have more niche jobs than people and are more than happy to have people help where they are interested.
My first full software job was a direct to consumer company, and during the Christmas rush the entire front office was on the packing line.
Larger companies tend to appreciate people staying in their lane.
In small companies there is one lane.
Which lane was I in?
>receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in
They were also converting paper records to digital. Asking the data entry person where the data is or how to find paper record xyz in the digital system doesn't seem odd.
In a small business, the receptionist may be responsible for inputting much of that data in the first place, and it may just live on the receptionist's computer.
In fact in some companies outside of tech proper with smaller headcount and less technically minded management, by the time the boss decides to look into systems like HRIS, CRM, ERM, and such the receptionist, office manager, and/or the interns already have about 837 Excel macros doing most of that work.
Microsoft Excel is the #1 tool at the top of that rather narrowly envisioned slippery slope, since you ask. Followed by any web browser.
As for data access; the vast majority of firms, worldwide, in every country, have abysmal internal controls, and in many cases, none at all. The filing cabinet is unlocked all day, everything from payroll to posters is in a share that every network login can R/W, and nobody cares.
Particularly those of us who don't have computer science training kind of end up falling into this stuff.
One of my first jobs was as an admin assistant at a utilities company. We logged data about pipe replacement, which was done in something like five different spreadsheets, each optimized for its printed form (legal requirements for paper copies of various things). I knew just about enough about Access to know that entering the same thing in 5 different spreadsheets is a waste of everyone's time so set up a database where people entered the information once and Access forms generated the five printable versions. Management were impressed and asked me what else I think might be possible. Cue me diving into the world of complex forms, eventually VBA, then once I got frustrated with that, VB.NET via SharpDevelop (they sure as hell weren't paying for Visual Studio), on and on. I was doing software engineering while still keeping the job title of admin assistant.
...then I went and got a real engineering job with a real salary.
Reminds me of this discussion between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey on this site 9 years ago. Rich Hickey always asserted that code is data (which aligns with the LISP view of the world), Alan Kay thinks that’s a bad idea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941656
Clojure is pretty similar to EDN which stands for extensible data notation.
cf. https://clojure.org/reference/reader
One answer to the question, from Bryan Cantrill:
> The thing that is remarkable about it is that it has this property of being information—that we made it up—but it is also machine, and it has these engineered properties. And this is where software is unlikely anything we have ever done, and we're still grappling on that that means. What does it mean to have information that functions as machine? It's got this duality: you can see it as both.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPa5-BWd4w&t=4m37s
> We suffer -- tremendously -- from a bias from traditional engineering that writing code is like digging a ditch: that it is a mundane activity best left to day labor -- and certainly beneath the Gentleman Engineer. This belief is profoundly wrong because software is not like a dam or a superhighway or a power plant: in software, the blueprints _are_ the thing; the abstraction _is_ the machine.
* https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2007/07/28/on-the-beauty-in-bea...
There's a similar article I read on this in regards to intelligence and LLMs that says simulated intelligence _is_ intelligence.
A Paul Ford masterpiece. I loved this so much when it came out, I split the article into a bunch of tweets and had a bot repost them every hour. rip, https://twitter.com/whatiscode
Related. Others?
What Is Code? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331697 - Oct 2022 (50 comments)
What is code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17259483 - June 2018 (36 comments)
What Is Code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870 - June 2015 (356 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699945
Thanks! That one had only one comment (a good one though - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700322) so I merged it into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870. (and yes, updated the comment count above)
Wow. The guy can write, that’s for sure!
And what a refreshment from f*king AI slop that you find everywhere these days.
You can say fucking here, one, we're all adults, two, there's no algorithms on HN penalising you (and if they were they'd penalise you anyway because it's not 1995 anymore), and three, it's almost insulting to believe replacing a letter with a star will make a word unrecognisable.
That said, this is why I like HN or any other kind of curated website, the voting systems and comments and the like will (hopefully) make sure low-effort writing will be filtered out.
There are algorithms at play across HN. There are more types of algorithms than ones that penalize comments with swear words in them.
Some HN algorithms are run by HN servers, some are run by HN moderators, and some are run by third parties.
Based on the comments. What is truth? (2026), or even sense?
Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship & doesn't even bother to even look at the code being produced anymore. Just today, I implemented 2 features using Cursor & GPT-5.1 Codex-Max & I didn't have to write a single line of code myself. But it felt wrong. It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".
Same, I got so much fomo from reading the gas town post I think you’re alluding too. Someone else can link it but it’s not “worth the read” in the way this was communicates so many ideas and captures/distills the zeitgeist of that time.
I guess the gas town one does capture our moment, but embracing YOLO spaghetti-o with reckless abandon, is a) depressing, even though I also feel like a middling programmer and b) actually seems to be dazzling these newer beleaguered bureaucrats precisely because they think they could just talk to the LLM instead of TMitTB.
Anyway, if that post and its ilk leave a bad taste, this was mouthwash for me. Lucky 10,000 I know, but I had never seen this (or felt so seen, as they say). I had to go check that he wasn’t wrong about PHP being Personal Home Page. I somehow never picked up that the recursive naming thing is a backcroynm.
Why are you using LLMs then, if you enjoy the actual process of thinking about a problem and solving it by writing code?
It's definitely a more enjoyable world this way.
I used to think this, until I tried it. Now I see that it effectively removes all the tedium while still letting you have whatever level of creative control you want over the output.
Just imagine that instead of having to work off of an amorphous draft in your head, it really creates the draft right in front of you in actual code. You can still shape and craft and refine it just the same, but now you have tons more working memory free to use for the actually meaningful parts of the problem.
And, you're way less burdened by analysis paralysis. Instead of running in circles thinking about how you want to implement something, you can just try it both ways. There's no sunk cost of picking the wrong approach because it's practically instantaneous.
I’m getting the impression that developers vary substantially in what they consider tedium, or meaningful.
Sure, and that goes even for myself. Like for example, on some projects maybe I'll be more interested in exploring a particular architectural choice than actually focusing on the details of the feature. It ultimately doesn't matter, the point is that you can choose where to spend your attention, instead of being forced to always go through all the motions even for things that are just irrelevant boilerplate
Shockingly, software developers are people, and are as varied as people are elsewhere. Particularly since it became (relatively) mainstream.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424585
Fortunately, at least in Europe, there are definitely companies still around who either don't force the usage of slop machines or even have a culture of rejecting them completely (yes, that's a thing, and I'm glad to be working at such a company).
So no, this isn't universally true.
It's because you're working in a retirement home (I do too), Europe lags a couple of years before US. Give it time.
> It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".
It feels different if you replace "LLM" with "outsourcing". Thing is, instructing a team of software engineers what you want is a lot more work (they need a lot more handholding), a lot more expensive, and a lot slower. But I'd argue that the work is the same - writing specifications, adjusting accordingly. Minus the human factor.
LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job, but it will affect outsourcing and agencies as an industry. Of course, outsourcing companies will / are using it too.
The difference is that before nobody forced you to be the manager of outsourced team, either you're fired or you're still working with code. Now you'll be expected to generate everything and oversee 10 agents.
>LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job
They won't same as the industrial revolution didn't kill farming as a job but it sure did ate up most of the farming roles. Most of the people you have ever met are people who would have been farmers had they been born before the revolution. Developers without much leverage, underpaid, overworked and competing with hundreds of experienced devs for a single role is likely to be the eventual future of most software development thus gradually becoming similar to other stem roles in terms of pay, competition and negotiation power.
Why not just let the product manager use some no-code tool?
I think software engineers are having an identity disconnect from their roles as engineers vs coders. Engineering is about solving problems via tools and knowledge through constraints. An engineer is not diminished by having other engineers or better tooling as assistants. If you are having problems understanding your role in the problem, frankly you need to review your skillset and adjust.
You are correct in the abstract, but concretely I contest how useful LLMs are for producing software. I don't doubt their usefulness in prototyping or, say, writing web apps, but I truly do not think they are revolutionary for me, or for software development as a whole.
atomic sequences that make other atomic sequences change energy states. now pass the butter.
Baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me, no more.
Code is rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps.