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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

#491

Post by dwd »

Mid-50s and also started programming in BASIC on any computer I could get my hands on, whether my own C64 or the BBC Micros or IBM XTs at school.

My take on AI really comes down to this:

Debugging your own code was an adventure and finally getting something work was a major rush. You had a sense of achievement.

Debugging LLM generated code is hell - it's basically debugging someone else code. There's no sense of achievement and no jump out of your chair and bounce around the room moments.

Sure, the code comes out fast, and maybe I'll find joy in finishing some side projects I've been tinkering with on and off since I first started programming, or it may just end up feeling like it's not mine any more.

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

#492

Post by GeoAtreides »

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…

Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)"

Casts your comment in a different light, I think.

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

#493

Post by cstever »

skydhash wrote: post #178
zozbot234 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Why would I spend time babysitting an LLM when I could have just done it myself

Exactly this. From what I understand an LLM has a limited context and will get that context wrong anyway and that context is on the edge of a knife and can easily be lost.

I'd rather mentor developers and build a team of living, breathing, thinking, compassionate humans who then in turn can mentor other living, breathing, thinking, compassionate humans.

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

#494

Post by soulofmischief »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #492
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…

Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)" Casts your comment in a different light, I think.

Appeal to identity. Prejucide and bias. Not considering an enthusiast of a technology might actually want to get paid working with that technology. Shameful comment all around.

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

#495

Post by JohnMakin »

layer8 wrote: post #237
JohnMakin wrote: post #147

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 no…

Some may feel that it is a luxury to feel passionate about one’s profession, but for me a life without that is pretty depressing. A society should strive to make fulfillment in a profession possible for everyone.

To me it feels the opposite of miserable. I can give work my full attention because it allows me freedom (mostly) to pursue other passionate things. This 40 hour a week (speaking generally, for me it can triple that sometimes) cost to me is far smaller than the depression I’d feel caring deeply about my particular craft in a field that doesn’t give a shit about it. That was proven to me very early in my career and is definitely cynical, but I don’t know where all the bright eyed bushy tailed opinions out there are coming from. probably completely different domains than my viewpoint.

Of course society should be a lot of things but that’s not a reality. Like, imagine a world exists soon where not every person (or even the majority of people) are useful, even formerly useful people - we already live in this world! If raw intellectual output is the value generator in the world we live in, and is a meritocracy, the simple fact by statistics is most will be left behind. what society already does to the disabled, and the sick is proof of this already. These people take professions to suit their circumstances. I am one, and I am fine with it. but by the parameters of the game, this is how to best maximize my passion output. Many people have many ideas how to change “society” I personally think is a waste of time, society adapts to circumstances most of the time. Except the people at the bottom usually get a raw deal.

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

#496

Post by icedchai »

cstever wrote: post #486
icedchai wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but I think smart people will figure out a balance. That 2 hours of output could take a week to debug and test.

Yes! I am not advocating for the 2 hours and the "vision" of managers and CEOs. Quite the contrary. But it is the world we live in for now. It's messy and chaotic and many people may (will?) be hurt. I don't like it. But I'm trying to be one of the "smart people". What does that look like? I hope I find out.

I don't like it, either. I hear people ranting about doing "everything with AI" on one meeting, and what a productivity boost it is, then I get tagged on a dumpster fire PR full of slop and emoji filled log statements. Like did you even look at your code at all? "Oh sorry I don't know how that got in there!"

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

#497

Post by GeoAtreides »

soulofmischief wrote: post #494
GeoAtreides wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)" Casts your comment in a different light, I think.

Appeal to identity. Prejucide and bias. Not considering an enthusiast of a technology might actually want to get paid working with that technology. Shameful comment all around.

Disclosing conflicting of interest is standard practice. People writing about economics do disclose when holding relevant shares.

In the end, it's a simple question: Are the opinions stated sincere or does the author have a pecuniary interest which might make things a bit more subjective?

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

#498

Post by saithound »

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…

> 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.

We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner.

But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper.

My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.

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

#499

Post by nunez »

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…

Those levels bake in the expectation of "codez real gud" at FAANG/MANGA/whatever style tech companies since the technical complexity of their operations is high and a high skill bar needs to be hurdled over to contribute to most of those codebases and make impact at the scale they operate at.

One's ability to reverse a binary tree (which is a BS filter, but it is what it is) hasn't been an indicator of ability in some time. What _is_ though, is the wherewithall to understand _when_ that's important and tradeoffs that come with doing that versus using other data structures or systems (in the macro).

My concern is that, assuming today's trajectory of AI services and tooling, the need to understand these fundamentals will become less important over time as the value of "code" as a concept decreases. In a world where prompting is cheap because AI is writing all the code and code no longer matters, then, realistically, tech will be treated even more aggressively as a line item to optimize.

This is a sad reality for people like me whose love for computers and programming got them into this career. Tech has been a great way to make a wonderful living for a long time, and it's unfortunate that we're robbing future generations of what we took for granted.

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