Same, but it changed when I was 17 and again when I was 27 and then 37 and so on. It has always been changing dramatically, but this latest leap is just so incredibly different that it seems unique.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#12The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.
If you bothered to read it you’d find that I am embracing the tools and I still feel there is craft. It’s just different. But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
Why should anyone bother to read what nobody wrote?
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#13>But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening. The abstraction ship sailed decades ago.
Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no mere incremental change. And the almost natural language interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart, and no, microcode and low level abstractions are not a real counter-argument to that). Even less so if agents turn autonomous and you just herd them onto completion.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#14My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.
The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.
I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#15The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.
If you bothered to read it you’d find that I am embracing the tools and I still feel there is craft. It’s just different. But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
Having an LLM write your blog posts is also lazy, and it's damn tedious to read.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#16The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.
If you bothered to read it you’d find that I am embracing the tools and I still feel there is craft. It’s just different. But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
"But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious."
Looks like this comment is embracing the tools too?
I'd take cheap snark over something somebody didn't bother to write, but expect us to read.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#17> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.
Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#18Yeah I could use Cursor or whatever but I don't, I like writing code. I guess that makes me a luddite or something, although I still develop agents. I enjoy architecting things (I don't consider myself an architect) I'm talking about my hobby hardware projects.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#19The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.
If you bothered to read it you’d find that I am embracing the tools and I still feel there is craft. It’s just different. But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
Speaking directly, if I catch the scent of ChatGPT, it's over.
People put out AI text, primarily, to run hustles.
So its writing style is a kind of internet version of "talking like a used car salesman".
With some people that's fine, but anyone with a healthy epistemic immune system is not going to listen to you.
If you want to save a few minutes, you'll just have to accept that.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#20same bud.
maybe that just means it's a maturing field and we gotta adapt?
yes, the promise has changed, but you still gotta do it for the love of the game. anything else doesnt work.