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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

#171

Post by rurp »

jayd16 wrote: post #128
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hope: I want to become a stronger dev. Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.

LLMs are similar in a lot of ways to the labor outsourcing that happened a generation or two ago. Except that instead of this development lifting a billion people out of poverty in the third world a handful of rich people will get even more rich and everyone else will have higher energy bills.

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

#172

Post by mosburger »

Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.

And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.

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

#173

Post by strictnein »

shafoshaf wrote: post #135
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…

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it. With AI, it i…

I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.

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

#174

Post by saulpw »

weli wrote: post #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…

config.sys was understandable. Now your computer has thousands (probably more) of config.sys-sized components and you are still only one person. The classic UI may improve your ability to find the components (sometimes) but can't reduce the complexity of either the components themselves or their quantity. AI makes it possible to deal with this complexity in a functional way.

Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to its uses.

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

#175

Post by Der_Einzige »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #116
zero_shift wrote: post #74

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things? About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills. Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An indus…

People get bored if they don't find real meaning in their work. https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care... Fact is, the tech sector is filled with folks that find zero joy in what they do, chose a career for financial reasons, and end up being miserable to everyone including themselves. The ex-service people would call these folks entitled Shitbirds, as no matter the situation some will complain…

The reason we don’t have the right to be lazy is because of the people who find “meaning” in toil. I do not want to work and AI is the most anti work technology in human history.

Bertrand Russel literally wrote a book called “in defense of idleness” because he knew that heavy hitters like him had to defend work abolitionism. The “work is good” crowd is why we can’t have nice things. You guys are time thief’s and ontologically evil. May all work supporters reincarnate as either durian fruits or cockroaches.

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

#177

Post by mosburger »

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!

this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark.

I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.

I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.

It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.

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

#178

Post by skydhash »

zozbot234 wrote: post #143
skydhash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Any change that I’ve done which resulted in more than a a 10 lines diff are done with tools (copy-paste, vim-fu, refactor tools or script, snippets, code generators,…) Why would I spend time babysitting an LLM when I could have just done it myself? The purpose of automation is to lighten my workload, not to add to it.

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

#179

Post by dingnuts »

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.

[dead]

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

#180

Post by spenrose »

“... when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed”

Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, etc. can provide empathy for and insight into your experience.

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