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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#141

Post by FeteCommuniste »

kccqzy wrote: post #113
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent of "employee development" with AI is just the release schedule of new models, I guess.

But the release of new models are generic. They don’t represent understanding in your specific codebase. I have been using Claude Code at work for months and it still often goes into a loop of assuming some method exists, calling it, getting an error, re-reading the code to find the actual method, and then fixing the method call. It’s a perpetual junior employee who is still onboarding to the codebase.

Yeah, I've experienced similar stuff. Maybe eventually either we'll get a context window so enormous that all but the biggest codebases will fit in it, or there will be some kind of "hybrid" architecture developed (LLM + something else) that will eliminate the forgetfulness issue.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#142

Post by ilitirit »

abraxas wrote: post #100
ilitirit wrote: post #26

I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either because: a) They asked an LLM b) "This is what all our competitors are doing" c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer d) [...insert any other absurd reason...] T…

Was he entirely wrong? Have you tried to dump the stored proc into a frontier model and ask it to refactor? You'd probably have neat 20 stored procs with well laid out logic in minutes. I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming increasingly trivial.

> Was he entirely wrong?

Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone through this process with multiple LLMs, from various perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if products existed that could help with this. That lead me down a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory reporting of a completely different nature which was effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended up doing.

Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was obviously absurd:

- He had never seen the SP

- He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting

- He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives

- He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL and ANSI SQL

- No consideration given to IP

- etc etc

Those are the basics. Let's jump a little bit into the detail. Here's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like:

   SELECT
    CASE
    WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221'
    WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011'
    END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region]
   -- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....
Yes, that's a typical column name that has rotted over time, so noone even knows if it's still correct. Yes, those are typical CASE statements (170+ of them at last count, and no, they are not all equal or symmetric).

So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the business rules either.

So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#143

Post by zozbot234 »

skydhash wrote: post #137
zozbot234 wrote: post #47

There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively, the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole thing: you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising code!) make sensible changes, as…

> you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing Why ask though? If I’m familiar with a project, more often than not, I usually have a very good idea of the code I have to write within minutes of reading the ticket. Most of the time taken is finding the impact of the change, especially with dependencies that are present in the business domain, but are not reflected in…

Because that's how you ensure that the AI has the right idea about what to do. If the proposed plan has problems, you work with the AI to fix them before setting it to work. AI is not as smart as you, so it needs to be told how to go about doing things.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#144

Post by skydhash »

abraxas wrote: post #95
randusername wrote: post #66

A lot of that magic still remains in embedded. If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon. At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".

The issue is that AI will be creating software at whatever abstraction layer it is asked to produce. Right down to ASM maybe even machine code if someone actually wanted or needed that. Perhaps not the AI of today but given a few years I'll be quite surprised if it still can't.

If we can take a computer as powerful as today’s laptops and make it crawl because of the amount of inefficiencies in software like Teams, I’m not holding breath for embedded. If you apply the same kind of engineering principle as Anthropic, you’ll be laughed out of the room.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#145

Post by waffletower »

Not going to pull age or title rank here -- but I suggest if your use of AI feels empty, take advantage of its speed and plasticity and iterate upon its output more, shape the code results. Use it as a sculptor might too -- begin with its output and make the code your own. I particularly like this latter approach when I am tasked with use of a language I view as inferior and/or awkward. While this might read as idealistic, and I agree that there are situations where this interaction is infeasible or inappropriate, you should also be encountering problems where AI decidedly falls on its face and you need to intervene.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#146

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic".

Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it.

I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#147

Post by JohnMakin »

I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing much with code, but I do love solving system scale problems, which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the most annoying parts of code I deal with are now abstracted into human language and specs, and I can now architect/build more creatively than before. So I am happy. But, I was one of those types that never had a true passion for "code" and have meant plenty of people that do have that, and I feel for them. I worry for people that carved out being really good at programming as a niche, but you enter a point in your career where that becomes much less important than being able to execute and define requirements and understand business logic. And yea, that isn't very romantic or magical, but I find passion outside of what pays my bills, so I lost that ennui feeling a while ago.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#148

Post by bitwize »

This isn't new. It's the same feeling the first commercial programmers had working in assembly, or machine code, once compilers became available. Ultimately I think even Mel Kaye forsook being able to handpick memory locations for optimum drum access before his retirement, in favor of being able to build vastly more complex software than before.

AI has just vastly extended your reach. No sense crying about it. It is literally foolish to lament the evolution of our field into something more.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#149

Post by JeremyNT »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92
sho_hn wrote: post #14

My 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…

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).

I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#150

Post by moffkalast »

samiv wrote: post #138
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.
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