I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.

AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.

I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.

I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.

The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.

In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?

This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!

Paying me $150k to do work that produces $1.5M for your business is great value - but getting the same work done for $15k is even better value.

No need to thank me. You're welcome.

It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384

I haven't calculated a cube root by hand since, what, sixth grade? (It's been so long I don't remember.) I'd hate to spend the mental cycles having to do that kind of task.

I am considering trying to move to some kind of non-coding role in tech. Maybe some kind of management role.

make an open source project without ai

I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.

Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.

Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.

But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).

Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.

Ultimately, I like the creation part of programming: creating something that doesn't exist that is of value to at least one person (usually me). In general, though, I get more satisfaction when more people get value out of my creations.

Through that lens, AI does change things: a whole set of things that I can create no longer have value to people (at least the value is lower, because AI can do it better than whatever product I create). But at the same time, I can now create more sophisticated and more powerful things with the help of AI.

On the whole, I'm more satisfied with AI than without.

Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment

For example, I'm working on an emulator in a field where emulators do exist since long. So I set myself to improve these emulators by emulating tricky corner cases. These corner cases do not exist in AI's memory because nobody has ever coded them. So although I use quite a lot of AI to investigate the corner cases, the actual problem solving is entirely mine. So I stay happy :-)

In my daytime job, a big part of what I do already exists in some form or another (fluid dynamics). But my job is more of understanding what I do so that I can convince someone else that my programs are robust and reliable. So again, I'm programming a lot with AI, but the important stuff, it's my skill to understand it, not AI.

Of course, “produce value” is slightly different from meaningful jobs that Bullshit Jobs was referring to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.

The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.

It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.

The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.

This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.

I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html

  > people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity

The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.

Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, was famously rejected from Google for not being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.

In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.

Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.

The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself.

* I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.

What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)

Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.

So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.

But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.

In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.

I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.

The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.

1. Fire everyone else

2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?)

3. Retire to Aruba

scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.

I hope that everyone agrees to collectively recognise we all need to still do some things together and the knowledge in our heads is still much more important.

I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.

Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.

You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.

Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.

I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.

I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.

The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.

¹ Probably including me.

You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".

But still souless, still sucks. Its just excuse of laziness. Pick up a brush, pick up an instrument and stop jerking around all day.

Talentless people are talentless because lack of effort, not because of lack of talent.

In front of those people, I will always bask in my sheer superiority because I make real music and real art. People compliment my musical skills and people don't compliment those who create song with AI.

We as a society need to be able to identify which one is AI generated and which one is not, and let the free market takes care of itself. Those who want AI generated things can have it, those that don't want can avoid it.

Take a guess which one will have more demand.

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take.

My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions.

> The people who are upset by this change...

Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.

If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed.

Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.

The lawyers with contempt for AI aren't necessarily the best "critical readers and reviewers of documents"; a good number just appreciate the substantial moat the current system keeps for them, and are contemptuous of 1) attempts to cross that moat without paying a toll, however likely that attempt is to fail, and 2) the way such failures highlight that our legal system doesn't work the way most people seem to think it does, because that increases the chances that the public will become dissatisfied and push for change.

I guess if it doesn't cross that moat, there cool with it?

In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users.

I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code.

I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book".

I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily.

And how many vibe-coded apps am I using?

Zero.

Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?

Think of it another way:

You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.

Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.

The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.

Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?

I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.

At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”

I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.

We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.

My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.

My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.

However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.

I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.

Many people have argued over the years that it would be great when we have an economy that takes care of all the labor and everyone in society is free to choose to spend all of their time on things that have no financial incentive.

The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?

The AI is enabling a lot more experimentation with software. The AI supplies the tomatoes (infrastructure / grunt work), grandma tries her recipes (the software / business idea).

The market for small batch locally made produce is huge. Entire grocery stores dedicated to local organic offerings is the standard in every upper middle class neighborhood on the entire west coast. The reason is obvious: a salad made with crappy tomatoes is a crappy salad.

We aren’t at this point in software yet because most consumers of software have no taste

So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).

People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.

And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.

Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't?

Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower.

How is that comparable to the arts?

If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?

Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists

Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.

I don't care about any of that. I just want people to be able to see what's in my mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible.

You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.

While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.

That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.

A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.

And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.

Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.

But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.

Are developers that use a "high level" language like C++ also doing nothing because the machine did all the work of compiling to assembly and machine code for them? Nothing to celebrate and no honor?

In my view, the one that "creates" is the one that puts in the majority of the effort. Under this definition, the average vibe coder isn't creating anything.

Well this is awkard...

I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.

That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems.

Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective.

But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.

I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.

> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.

Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.

I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)

Certainly, it's easier to produce solutions now, but I wouldn't underestimate the knowledge you have, and say that others who are capable of using AI to produce the same output have the same understanding that you do.

Personally, I find that I am able to produce excellent outcomes with AI with respect to the topics that I have the most expertise in, and passingly acceptable outcomes in things that I know very little about.

Milt Bryce and his son Tim were pretty much the inventors of modern information-systems management[0]. And they were open in their hatred of and contempt for programmers and how they worked. Their methodology, PRIDE, was centered around giving the programmers as little to do and as little autonomy and leverage over the organization as possible, because information systems is a business function and not a technical one. The key decisions would be made by systems analysts and designers, not programmers. Without AI, the part that programmers contributed in a PRIDE project was about 15%; with AI, it asymptotically approaches zero. I've been studying PRIDE a lot over the past few years, because with Tim Bryce's death it's at risk of being forgotten; and because now with AI in the mix, it helps me understand what's actually going on from a business perspective.

This is what management has wanted all along. Programmers are expensive, tetchy, and they resist standardization and discipline, preferring instead to employ their own little bespoke methods and tool choices. (Hello, vim vs. emacs!) Failure to keep them in tight rein can spell doom for the company, as they can use their technical skills to their advantage, potentially holding the whole business hostage. You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does (especially in traditional businesses: banking, insurance, manufacturing, etc.). Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.

The only way out for us is to follow Rogue's mom's advice: "Have you tried not being a nerd?" Learn business, learn what customers actually want and what business operations need in order to fulfill those wants. Think like a systems analyst—big picture, focused on information flows between companies, departments, people, not like a programmer (detailist obsessed with the machine in PRIDE ideology).

[0] Maybe Margaret Hamilton predated them, but not by much.

I want to build something useful for them but if they let me be too close to the customer, I'll be making important decisions that are supposed to be someone else's job.

Hehe, my undergrad was comp sci, I turned down an Oxbridge postgraduate in Advanced Computing Science to do an interdisiplinary PhD, technically in the social sciences department, because I genuinely do understand and agree with you on a few levels. At the end of the day, people are the ones who need to be kept happy. The flip side of 1000's of isolated hours of screentime is a lack of practice at making people feel comfortable in real life. But, the same is true for basically any craftsman of any craft, just swap screen with lathe or instrument or other tool of choice.

I think there's a biological element to being a nerd, so "Have you tried not being a nerd?" is like asking someone with ginger hair "have you tried not being ginger?" Sure, they can try/dye, but the roots will keep growing through, fighting against something that's a massive asset in the right environment.

Regarding PRIDE, it sounds like that came from a time where people were genuinely scared/amazed/confused by computers. When you consider that, minimising the role of people who are going to make it all about tech and computers makes sense. Maybe the tide is changing over the past 2 - 5 years against tech, but the entire 2000s up until recently were defined IMO by the pervasiveness and excitement and accessibility of tech by literally everyone on the planet. In that world, where customers pay good money for magic tech they don't understand, a company of nerds brings safety and reassurance (and high salaries and decision impact for said nerds).

I worry nerds and the products of nerds at the top like Zuckerberg, Altman and Musk are causing the public attitude to shift back to what they were like pre-2000s, where tech is dangerous and powerful and scary and normal humans need to be kept away from it, and advocates of tech should be viewed sceptically.

> Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.

This is essentially my central point/worry. I hope there's more nuance to it though, mainly because 1 younger relative in particular is in his early teens, and he's clearly a naive/friendly/enthusiastic/hyper-fixating/lots of nerdy screentime type. Until a few years ago, I assumed he'd have the life a lot of us have had. Now though, I wonder what life will be afforded to nerdy, weird people born into a world where they're seen as significantly less necessary.

Tried and failed for decades, yes. Turns out caring for your craft makes you a nerd. Turn out what people want is to stay in their lane and simply want "the fries in the bag", with no curiosity on what's in the fries or bag as long as it tastes good.

I refuse to stop caring in this otherwise uncaring world. Now what?

>You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does

It is true. What this ultiamtely breaks down to is simple: Nerds are thinkers, and thinkers question. The context here is in tech and automation, but that's a trend that extends to a lot of systems and societies. Those in power hate the thinkers, they hate the questions. They will suppress it for as long as possible.

Use this lens in other kinds of communities and you see the pattern pops up everytime. To "stop being a nerd" in this context is akin to saying "stop questioning the system and exploit it like the rest of us".

"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."

People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.

There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".

But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.

Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.

Interesting mix.

Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.

I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.

Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....

LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.

I really don't get the hate.

Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.

I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes

Each step removed one more piece of friction.

I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.

All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?

---

I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.

A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.

The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.

Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!

Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.

We could go back and forth on the analogy but I think it comes down to one of two things:

1. You enjoy writing code to fix a problem

2. You enjoy fixing problems and solve that by writing code

If you're in camp 1 then AI feels extremely unfulfilling and understandably so, for camp 2 it's a whole new world.

Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.

The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.

With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...

That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.

I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.

I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.

Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.

I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.

Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.

But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.

> "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back."

That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole.

The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.

A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place.

It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.

LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.

IF you were already doing it. But LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing as well. In the same way Excel macros enabled some people to run whole businesses on a spreadsheet without hiring a "real" programmer, LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer. And yeah, some of those excel macros were a nightmare, one of the many jobs I've taken over the years was a contract job converting the business logic that used to be in excel macros and later vba script to a "real" language and application. But the business that hired me only had the sort of money they needed to hire me because they had a successful business running off that horrible spaghetti mess. I wonder what businesses will be hiring "real" programmers when their founders hit the wall of what they can accomplish on their own with AI.

SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this for several decades now.

Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).

But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.

I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.

"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.

like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.

Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.

A million lines of LLM slop?

As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.

> I really don't get the hate

I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"

It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"

I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

---

>have "problem"

>don't care

>have no problem

Life is literally so easy.

Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this.

What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.

By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades.

THAT, I believe, is what our craft truly is.

Yes obviously. But consider:

In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them

Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck

Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet

It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building

My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future

Maybe to cheer you up: we're doing a few tests at our org, and we found that product-minded engineers still have a tremendous leg-up compared to other people when it comes to actually shipping products. It's not even a race.

It's not just quality of code, it's also speed of execution, maintainability. Why? Because we're not building 200 database tables + 200 endpoints when 1 table + enum suffices. Yes that happened. There was also one feature that I can't comment much on because it would doxx but: a PR from non-dev took months, was 100k LOC and rejected by product and engineering as low-quality. The same feature built by my team was 900 LOC, feature complete, shipped.

Nothing beats the combination of domain expertise and expertise in the medium.

I'm always learning new things. The things I learn jsut happen to no longer align with what current speculative crazy investors want.

>the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane.

and what if I do not need agentic development for my creations? my domain is not one where "building more" is the bottleneck. I don't need to ship faster, I nee to ship more deliberately

It's possible that wishing instant death on people may make you unpopular. But also, maybe you're a poet or artist now. No one makes money of the years of toil it takes to become an expert at that craft, either. If the craft is important, then the money is secondary, and no one will ever stop you from writing code the way you love to, they just won't pay you to do it that way.

the money is secondary. Sadly, rent is primary.

Give me enough to retire and I'll happily spend the rest of my days on my craft. Until then, the options are combining your craft, minmaxing your career to minimize work (too late for me), or to do something else that pays the bills for the next 30 years. And the cost to retrain isn't cheap either.

Some may think their pursuit of mastery is now wasted, but I find that intriguing especially in a field where mastery cannot really be obtained due to technological progress. I suppose I just don't let others reduce my own experience and what I value?

That is to say - I don't really love programming. I do it out of necessity. Before product managers got looked at as 'too much headcount in an org', I kind of think I would have liked that.

I like the outcomes. I like tools that I like to use. I like writing tools and software and systems that work for me.

I also like the outcomes for OTHER people. In my line of work, things working is really important - it costs money when things are not working - so I like building those systems that work but also have good tools to inspect when things go amiss or need to be changed.

I am like an engineer (I am not) who learned how to use R or Matlab - for the outcome not for the love of the game.

Another example may be cars. I am a competent mechanic. I have been employed as a mechanic. The reason I like cars is to drive them. At the end of the day every bolt that is stuck and every radiator I have to drop is excruciating and painful and I hate it, but the look on the customers face when they can get back in their car is priceless.

The "no, but you see, the important part is what I do!" replies get really tiresome after a while.

> convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication

ok, so what does a dirty novel, or some other pulp fiction convince or inform you of?

You can call the popular "taken off my feet by the mysterious handsome Werewolf that will fight to the death for me" trite. But readers into that have a pretty clear message they want to receive.

Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?

It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.

I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...

I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.

Exactly!

And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.

Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.

For me the more interesting and productive thinking happens when I'm trying to understand what I want the code to do, not when I'm thinking about the implementation details.

Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.

Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.

I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.

At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.

So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.

There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.

So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.

Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.

A good question.

It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.

Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff.

Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out.

Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to.

I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs.

The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.

I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.

Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.

If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.

If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.

The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."

What's happening to you now may also feel unfair, but it's up to you if you're just going to be pissed on your own behalf, or if, now that you recognize that everyone else is going through what you've been newly-introduced to, you're going to go, "Hey, no one should have to live like this! Fix this crap for everyone."

On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft.

Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do.

They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.

Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right!

I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell.

Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.

There is a goal, LLM's cannot achieve that goal, despite what others want to claim of it. Maybe it can save some time, but not anywhere close to these magical 20x speedups others speak of. because coding is not the bottleneck of "make a fun game".

I hope that simplification helps on why I am opposed to LLMs as of now.

Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.

I have produced more cool shit in the last 6 months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's an amazing time to be alive.

My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.

You're facing strict requirements for fundamentals in 3 independent axis. If there's recommendation to anyone looking to "write code" today, its to specialize in a field where software (or firmware) is applied to a hard engineering domain. This has been common advice since 2010 [1], long before LLMs:

"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."

[1] https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html

As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.

But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?

I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?

https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.

Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.

[0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/

We're not so different, he and me.

Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies.

Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.

I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.

There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.

Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined.

I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.

  Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?

  Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?

  Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?

  it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?

*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.

I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.

There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.

This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR

A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI.

Share anecdotes and examples if you have any