This makes me think about the craftsmen whose careers vanished or transformed through the ages due to industries, machines etc. They did not have online voices to write 1000's of blogs everyday. Nor did they have people who can read their woes online.
We mourn our craft
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Re: We mourn our craft
#22Speak 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!
Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you.
I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
Re: We mourn our craft
#23"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.
This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet?
Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
Re: We mourn our craft
#24I 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 learn…
Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things.
This new world makes me more effective at it.
And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.
Re: We mourn our craft
#25> We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor.
Oh come on. 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.
Re: We mourn our craft
#26I 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 somet…
We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.
Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
Re: We mourn our craft
#27Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.
Re: We mourn our craft
#28I wonder whether, in the end, it was simply poor accessibility that made programmers special, and whether it is that what some of them are missing. Being special by "talking" a special language their customers can't comprehend.
Sure, they are still needed for debugging and for sneering at all those juniors and non-programmers who will finally be able to materialise their fantasies, but there is no way back anymore, and like riding horses, you can still do it while owning a car.
Re: We mourn our craft
#29The thing he has spent his whole career doing unto others he finally did into himself
Re: We mourn our craft
#30While 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?
I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will probably always be a heavily diminished demand for handcrafted code.