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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

#571

Post by bestthrowaway »

lelanthran wrote: post #350
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.

> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. It's very sad, for me. Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games. I'm looking at all these people proudly showin…

I play video games for fun. I also enjoy automation games where the point is to get the game to play itself. I like achievements, but I won't "cheat" to get them.

My company pays me to build software that helps make them money. They don't care how I write that software as long as I do it fast and correctly. If that's by hand, I'll do it by hand. If vibe coding can get the job done, then I'll do that.

"Vibe coding" isn't just writing specs. It's ensuring that the vibe coding process doesn't introduce regressions, new bugs, etc. My boss writes specs for me, which, if I were to naively plop them into cursor or Claude code, would generate stuff that kinda works but not in a way that could be considered production ready. I plan, adjust the plan, generate, regenerate, refine. Could it be done faster by hand? Maybe. But it's the tool I've chosen for the job and the bosses are happy with it.

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

#572

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

abustamam wrote: post #553
dzonga wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

It depends, of course, but in my experience managers like this do get fired after a few years, followed shortly after or before by their manager.

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

#574

Post by konart »

senfiaj wrote: post #512
JKCalhoun wrote: post #394

I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree thi…

I'm a millennial, but I share some feelings. I also think modern programming careers often feel like factory jobs where most of the time you must be compliant with some BS. You often find the true joy only in personal projects.

Modern programming careers _are_ factory jobs.

Until you have some sort of senior+ position you are literally just standing in front of a conveyor line.

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

#575

Post by saghm »

saithound wrote: post #498
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…

Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.

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

#576

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

lelanthran wrote: post #568
NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument is not Then what is it. be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.

> Then what is it. It's that the erosion and atrophying of the fundamental skill that made you (or, in this case, the GP) valuable is a matter of concern, because you (or GP, as the case may be) are willingly embracing the fact that you will be no more valuable than the average office office worker, and so can expect that compensation will drop to match. As an example, moving to Python from C was was moving to a high…

I guess the entire thing is I like building working systems.

I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture.

Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem

What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pay someone a lot less than me (or any American - I’m in no way bragging about comp) to code.

Companies don’t pay my employer the bill rate they charge for me based on how well I code. While I’ve been expected to produce production level code as part of my job across 5 companies in the past decade not a single one asked me to write a line of code as part of the interview. They were much more concerned about ability to get things done.

Ironically, even the job at BigTech that landed in my lap was all behavioral (AWS ProServe). I damn sure didn’t get that job because of my whopping two years of AWS experience at the time. Most of my answers for “tell me about a time when…” were leading non AWS projects.

I’m not bragging - I’m old. My competitive advantage should be more than just my coding ability.

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

#577

Post by saghm »

cstever wrote: post #451
jbeninger wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete. When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a…

Serious question: so what then is the value of using an LLM? Just autocomplete? So you can use natural language? I'm seriously asking. My experience has been frustrating. Had the whole thing designed, the LLM gave me diagrams and code samples, had to tell it 3 times to go ahead and write the files, had to convince it that the files didn't exist so it would actually write them. Then when I went to run it, errors ... i…

The value is pretty similar to autocomplete in that sometimes it's more efficient than manually typing everything out. Sometimes the time it takes try select the right thing the complete would take longer to type manually, and you do it that way instead, and sometimes what you want isn't even going to be something you can autocomplete at all so you do it manually because of that.

Like autocomplete, it's going to work best if you already know what the end state should be and are just using it as a quicker way of getting there. If you don't already know what you're trying to complete, you might get lucky by just tabbing through to see if you find the right result, or you might spend a bunch of time only to find out that what you wanted isn't coming up for what you've typed/prompted and you're back to needing to figure out how to proceed.

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

#578

Post by zepolen »

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…

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode

Which mythical AI are you using that does this?

All the ones I've tried feel like little toddlers that completely miss the point, forget half the requirements mid way, are adamant that they are completely correct then have the gall to act an authority when you point out glaring issues.

I take way less time doing it myself vs coaxing an AI to get a decent solution that catches all edge cases.

AI for me is only useful on subjects I know nothing about, and even then, given I know how bad it is in subjects I know everything about I take everything it says with a megacrystal of salt.

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

#579

Post by abustamam »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #572
abustamam wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

It depends, of course, but in my experience managers like this do get fired after a few years, followed shortly after or before by their manager.

Years! I can see why managerial positions can be so coveted. You can be shitty at your job for years before getting sacked.

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

#580

Post by saghm »

akdev1l wrote: post #386
jbeninger wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete. When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a…

I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me

Having bad coworkers who write sloppy code isn't a new problem, and it's always been a social problem rather than a technical one. There was probably a lot less garbage code back when it all only ran on mainframes because fewer people having access meant that only the best would get the chance, but I still think that opening that up has been a net benefit for the craft as a whole.
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