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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

#601

Post by carefree-bob »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #592
carefree-bob wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers. And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and starte…

> It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers.

You are not understanding the point. AI has to be properly supervised because it makes mistakes. Now if you are making more or as many mistakes as the AI, then you should look for a new career. You should understand the code better than the AI, because the AI has a limited context window, and for a large codebase, you should know that codebase better than the AI.

Now, you can use AI to help you understand code that someone else wrote. You can use AI to check your code. You can use AI to write unit tests. You can use AI to debug. You can use AI to summarize code. There are so many uses of AI.

But you -- you as a developer -- need to understand your codebase. If you do not understand the codebase, you can't properly supervise the AI. And there is one efficient way for you to understand a big complicated codebase. The most efficient way possible for you to learn it. That is by you writing code in that codebase, and debugging that code, and learning how to code in that codebase.

If you don't do that, then you are not qualified to supervise the AI. Now you are letting the AI loose on a codebase much larger than its context window, and you will fill the codebase with bugs.

It's like a student. Sure you can use AI to help you study, to explain things to you, but the moment you let the AI do your homework, then you are no longer learning. The homework is the practice of solving problems in that area, and as a developer, you need to write code in a codebase otherwise you have no value and the AI has no value.

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

#603

Post by lelanthran »

nunez wrote: post #510
lelanthran wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc. They know everything , except how to program.

I was a BA forever ago during a summer job in college. That job wasn't for me at all! Looking back on the experience, putting together a FRD felt much like writing a CLAUDE.md with some prompts thrown in!

> I was a BA forever ago during a summer job in college. That job wasn't for me at all! Looking back on the experience, putting together a FRD felt much like writing a CLAUDE.md with some prompts thrown in!

But soon enough, all s/ware dev jobs will be that, because LLMs can write code faster than humans can.

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

#604

Post by bitwize »

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…

> But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)

That is why y'all needed the God-Emperor of Marketing to come in and rescue you from bankruptcy and put you on track to becoming a trillion-dollar company.

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

#605

Post by newswasboring »

grayhatter wrote: post #268
newswasboring wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having opencode doesn't preclude me from making elegant code. It just takes away the carpel tunnel.

> I created this with some kind of genai To me, it just feels like plagiarism. Can you explain why it doesn't feel like plagiarism to you?

The same reason why using a generator like antlr doesn't feel like plagiarism to me. I don't outsource thinking to these models, only coding. My spec files contain the architecture, and details of intent on each interface. That is the part of the work that actually matters, rest of it is just code monkey stuff. While I am sad I don't get the peace and satisfaction of churning out code, my primary goal is to make cool things not coding.

edit: typo.

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

#606

Post by newswasboring »

grayhatter wrote: post #521
neom wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw your line between plagiarism and creativity? I learned in art school this question is more difficult to answer than it appears when taken seriously.

That's a great question, I've never tried to draw a concrete line before. Code is inherently creative. But it's not art, it doesn't map 1:1 like that. But I wouldn't consider attempting to duplicate a painting, plagiarism if you painted it yourself with your hand (assuming you mention or reference the original author, or it's well know e.g. starry night) . I would consider it plagiarism if you duplicated it via photo…

> But if you didn't make the decision about where to place the function, about which order you want to call them, if you're gonna do error handling deep down as close to the error as possible,

I still make all those decisions. I decide what my error handling structure is, and I have it finally exactly the way I like it in python. I usually discover the "right" way for a piece of software while writing it, then it is a chore to refactor to make it consistent across the code base again. Now I just make a spec (edit: for the refactor which defines this new abstraction and its interfaces), let it run and go grab a coffee. Yes I dont decide anymore exactly which line number the function is in, but that never mattered did it? What matters is how your objects compose and how you handle edge cases. I still do that.

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

#607

Post by iso1631 »

clickety_clack wrote: post #341
JeremyNT wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things…

> it’s obviously not going to stop there. I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.

Originally spinners and weavers were quite happy. One spun, the other weaved, and the cloth was made.

Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.

The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.

But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.

Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.

Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)

Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.

This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.

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

#608

Post by iso1631 »

jonas21 wrote: post #204
JeremyNT wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things…

> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.

For those who survived sure. For those at the time, I'm sure they would disagree

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

#609

Post by newswasboring »

grayhatter wrote: post #547
quietsegfault wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing. You’ve ignored that entirely to construct a version of me who pastes “write me an app” and ships it unread… then spent three paragraphs righteously tearing that down. I own the intent, the spec, the judgment about what’s correct, and the blame when it breaks. That’s authorship, and that’s why using a generative tool isn’t plagiarism. The rest is breathless gibbe…

> “write me an app” and ships it unread… That is in fact, the behavior I see most often. > What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing. You didn't actually describe any of that though? You asserted that's what you do, but didn't describe any of those steps. If you do, you'd be the first person I see actually do that when using LLM codegen. Most people who advocate for it, do behave that way. You're mistake…

You've made a straw man of how people use codegen and are not willing to change your opinion even though people are telling you this is not how they use code gen.

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

#610

Post by saithound »

saghm wrote: post #575
saithound wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proc…

> you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.

Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved.

Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.

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