161–170 of 1001 posts
With Claude Code specifically, I've noticed that the longer it runs autonomously, the more cost anxiety creeps in. You stop thinking about the problem and start watching the token counter.
What finally let me stop worrying and just build again was building a hard budget limit outside the app — not just alerts, but an actual kill switch.
Glad you found the spark. It's worth protecting.
I have a sense that AI could have something to do with it.
AI is degrading the status of our profession; its perception in the public eye.
At the same time, it is stealing our work and letting cretins pretend to be software engineers.
It's a bad taste in the mouth.
I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software…
Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correct…
Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that will never come ...
There is only so much you can learn by reading; it requires doing.
The good thing about traditional sources like books, tutorials and other people's code bases is that they give you something, but don't write your project for you.
Now you can be making a project, yet be indefinitely procrastinating the learn-by-doing part.
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…
AI will have to take a different direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon. What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!" This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a…
I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I keep hearing is that the people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones reluctant to embrace LLMs because they are too emotionally attached to "coding" as a discipline rather than design and architecture, which are where the interesting and actually difficult work is done.
Really? To me it seems that quite the opposite is true - people who were never very good at writing code are excited about LLMs because suddenly they can pretend to be architects without understanding what's happening in the codebase. Same as with AI-art, where people without much drawing skills were excited about being able to make "art".
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. It may look the same, but it isn't the same. In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience. The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and whil…
What I want when I'm coding, especially on open source side projects, is to retain copyright licensing over every line (cleanly, without lying about anything).
Whoops!