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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

#581

Post by carefree-bob »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #555
carefree-bob wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to delegate writing code to AI? I don't do that. Is your job mandating that you vibe code? How would they know?

They would know when you are two or three times slower producing code because you insist on having your own handcrafted, bespoke artisanal code that doesn’t meet the requirements any better than Claude could do.

Two to three times faster? Has productivity doubled or tripled? Stuff shipping in 1/3 the time? I'm not aware of this - which company is now shipping features twice as fast?

AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward.

You can also use AI to write unit tests, documentation, and stuff like that, while writing the code yourself.

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

#582

Post by abustamam »

nylonstrung wrote: post #528
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.

I think this is subjective, I personally enjoy "managing" agents more than handwriting code and dealing with syntax At the very least, it feels ergonomic and saves me keystrokes in the same way as stuff like snippets & aliases

Likewise! It's a fun puzzle to solve to figure out the right incantation to get the LLM to do what I want it to do without going off the rails.

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

#583

Post by wsc981 »

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…

At least AI seems very useful to quickly write unit tests for the stuff I work with these days, like Angular & C#.

P.S.: I loved Glider and Glypha, great games!

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

#584

Post by abustamam »

neilellis wrote: post #347
p-t wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's more just a personal want to be able to see what I can do on my own tbh; i don't generally judge other people on that measure although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol

So not disagreeing as you say, it is a personal thing! I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too. I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed s…

If you managed an AI (or rather, ai system) that wrote a compiler or web browser like Claude code or cursor did, would you feel like you did it?

Just a curious question, not trying to be combative or anything.

I myself will go into planning mode and ask it to implement a feature, and ask it to give me tradeoffs between implementation details. Then I might chat with it a bit to further understand the implementation before it writes the plan.

I find it to be very effective and gives me a sense of agency in my features.

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

#585

Post by _carbyau_ »

A lot of things that require both art and meeting constraints involve mindfulness, programming being one of them.

People used to talk about "getting into the zone" or "being in the flow" and how open offices disrupt that ability to focus or concentrate.

Now the only flow is management of agentic AI which I imagine is hard for people to get into the same mindfulness state.

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

#586

Post by abustamam »

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…

There's a time and a place for certain tools.

Sometimes I like playing chess at the park with strangers or friends. Sometimes I like playing chess online with friends in another country.

Sometimes I like to play games online with my siblings. Sometimes I like to invite people over to play video games with me on the couch.

Sometimes I wanna watch a movie in the theater. Sometimes I wanna fire up Netflix and watch that same movie, but on my couch.

Sometimes I wanna vibe code an entire app in a weekend. Sometimes I wanna play code golf to solve a puzzle, where LLM usage defeats the purpose.

None of these are being replaced in my life despite having more "advanced" options. If anything, I get to enjoy things more because I have more options and ways to enjoy them.

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

#587

Post by casey2 »

I'm confused about the typescript jab. I'm not a web dev, but to my understanding is that you can easily get a target machines' instructions for typescript if you want. It's much closer to "real programming" than the unix/python detour people are obsessed with for some reason.

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

#588

Post by abustamam »

icedchai wrote: post #216
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…

I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.

I think if companies are gonna allow engineers to vibe code they really need to provide training on how to vibe code and not produce slop.

If a company is gonna REQUIRE vibe coding as an accelerator then it is in the company's best interest to invest in education!

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

#589

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #294
visarga wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.

Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are cu…

Software development was a race to the bottom for the majority of developers aside from the major tech companies for a decade. I’m seeing companies on the enterprise/corp dev side - where most developers work - stagnate for a decade and not keep up with inflation in tier 2 cities - again where most developers work.

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

#590

Post by lelanthran »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #576
lelanthran wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

> What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation.

Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose).

I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me valuable (in a similar position that you have, except that I don't write a line of code) is the current ability to program.

I (and you, no doubt) would be useless in the type of position that you are in if you didn't sweat blood earlier in your career getting things right while programming.

What I am saying is that my entire value proposition is built on a high skill level in programming. Letting those skills atrophy is, in my opinion, devaluing myself.

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