We mourn our craft
nolanlawson.com
We mourn our craft
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Re: We mourn our craft
#2Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun.
And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back.
I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!
Re: We mourn our craft
#31. it isn't that bad
2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i provide very specific prompts
3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay your bills every month is something i could do when my parents paid my bills
These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or Opus producing the code.
Re: We mourn our craft
#4While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
Re: We mourn our craft
#5> I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.
This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and read and listen to.
Re: We mourn our craft
#6dude needs to chill
also:
> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.
no we won't lol wtf
but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time
Re: We mourn our craft
#7"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
Re: We mourn our craft
#8While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
Re: We mourn our craft
#9I do not mourn.
For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.
When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.
When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.
Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.
Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.
It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.
Re: We mourn our craft
#10I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing.
I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.