Article URL: https://pydantic.dev/articles/the-human-in-the-loop-is-tired Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48942000 Points: 115 # Comments: 58

This is an attempt to put words around something I think most developers are experiencing right now but haven't had time to make sense of. Programming with LLMs is genuinely useful and genuinely destabilizing. These two things coexist. If we pretend the second one isn't happening, we will all burn out. At Pydantic, we build tools that developers use to validate data, build AI agents, and observe what their systems are doing in production. We are, quite literally, in the business of making LLM-powered software more reliable. And we are also having a weird time. This isn't a thinkpiece about whether AI will replace programmers. It's not a doomer essay and it's not a hype piece. It's an honest account of what it feels like to be a developer right now, from someone inside it, and some thoughts on what might actually help. When I was first learning to code in my early twenties, I remember having this distinct sensation that programming let me dip my hands into the fabric of the universe and shape it to my will. This was, of course, before I'd hit too many compile errors. But that feeling of touching some deep fundamental layer of abstraction, of being able to make things from nothing but logic, has always stuck with me. I'm not a Computer Science graduate. I'm a designer and a programmer — formally trained in the first, self-taught in the second. I came to the formalisms of software engineering through painful experience rather than academic instruction. If anything, that made me take those principles more seriously once I understood them. When you've earned your opinions about architecture and code quality the hard way, they feel less like textbook rules and more like scar tissue. That primal feeling of creation? It's the same promise that the low-code and no-code tools of the 2010s kept making but never quite delivered on. I'm old enough to remember building web pages in Dreamweaver, watching Adobe spruik zero-code design tools that generated absolute spaghetti under the hood. It was always almost there, just good enough to hint at a future that was just around the corner (if only you were smart enough to grasp it). If you're cynical about the current wave of AI tools, I get it. We've been promised this before. But this time the gap between promise and reality has actually, finally, narrowed to something meaningful. And that's exactly what makes it so unsettling. Yes the code (sorta) writes itself, but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better.