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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

#431

Post by Kon5ole »

probably_wrong wrote: post #132
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…

> There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.

>As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.

I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.

Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.

It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at least equally magical for a kid today.

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

#432

Post by mbesto »

lelanthran wrote: post #301
shafoshaf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code. Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

> Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python? Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?

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

#433

Post by lelanthran »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #425
lelanthran wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the…

If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated…

> Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”

Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument.

I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on:

> If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.

The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.

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

#434

Post by munificent »

small_model wrote: post #413
munificent wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some, the feeling of pulling those weeds out is inseparable from the holistic experience they think of as "gardening".

So using weedkiller isn't gardening to these people?

My point is just that if there are 10 different activities that produce the same resulting object, they aren't necessarily the same activities in the minds of the participants solely because the output is the same.

The process and experience matters too.

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

#435

Post by lelanthran »

mbesto wrote: post #432
lelanthran wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code. Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

> Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same? Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python? Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?

> Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python?

Maybe. Are they here now?

> Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?

No. Being able to solve a problem using Python over C is not even in the same class of being able to solve a problem by asking for it in English.

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

#436

Post by nomel »

qingcharles wrote: post #368
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.

AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire career. I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me. I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.

Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level design/structure part of it.

THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns.

Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.

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

#437

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

lelanthran wrote: post #433
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated…

> Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud” Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one , is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this arg…

There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code.

Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.

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

#438

Post by zahlman »

dgacmu wrote: post #134
raphman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author admits that they used AI but I found it not that obvious. What are telltale signs in this case? While the writing style is a little bit over-stylized (exactly three examples in a sentence, Blade Runner reference), I might write in a similar style about a topic that im very emotional about. The actual content feels authentic to me.

(1) The pattern "It's not just a X---It's a Y" is super common in LLM-generated text for some reason. Complete with em dash. (I like em dashes and I wish LLMs weren't ruining them for the rest of us) "Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative." "You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity." "The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and pu…

Out of curiousity, for those who were around to see it: was writing on LinkedIn commonly like this, pre-chatGPT? I've been wondering what the main sources were for these idioms in the training data, and it comes across to me like the kind of marketing-speak that would make sense in those circles.

(An explanation for the emoji spam in GitHub READMEs is also welcome. Who did that before LLMs?)

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

#439

Post by Jare »

alexgarden wrote: post #276
anonymous908213 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think. It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years…

If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one. I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was…

I remember a magazine cover that labeled you a gaming god, hard to peak beyond that! The quote you provided back then resonates perfectly with what you describe here: "If there's one message I like to get across to people, I like them to really and truly embrace [the fact that] anything that your imagination can conceive of is possible."

- https://hl-inside.me/magazines/pc-gamer-us/PC-Gamer_2000-11_...

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

#440

Post by bentt »

jamwil wrote: post #409
bentt wrote: post #400

Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields. These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce food. If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.

Many of them might have been troubled by the fact that they couldn’t afford a tractor. Many small farms became a few big ones, and so it will go in software.

Didn’t that already happen in software? Seems like network effects got ahead of this.
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