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Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

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Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#41

Post by sublinear »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all.

I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few days. It wouldn't even matter if I got it done faster since the bottleneck is decisions in the next meeting or waiting to hear back from another team. Dev time was always trivial and irrelevant. Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal.

What else are you doing with your time? How much discussion does your team even have if the nuances of the code aren't important to you?

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#43

Post by kazinator »

sublinear wrote: post #41
yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few day…

If you ship something, by some means, you get blame if it goes wrong.

But when it goes right, you can only get credit if you wrote it yourself.

If you're risking being blamed, that should be balanced with credit.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#45

Post by kaffekaka »

drudolph914 wrote: post #33
yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone.…

No 4: getting off social media and HN is a good thing in general and in particular. There really is a distortion field around these sites that can make you feel sick.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#46

Post by peter_retief »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#47

Post by anon7725 »

drudolph914 wrote: post #33
yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone.…

Thanks for this. Another perspective shift: do real things in the real world. Read physical books, make art with your own two hands, garden, go for a walk. I’m going to re-learn cursive handwriting. No real reason other than my handwriting is bad and I want to incorporate more writing into my life. The recent post here about Neal Stephenson was an inspiration.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#48

Post by brokegrammer »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

It's not true at all. I recently vibe coded a REST API in Golang even though I never wrote any production Go code. However, I had to make copious use of my previous experience as an engineer to achieve quality.

You can see this in the real world. The people who are getting the most out of AI are the ones who already have experience coding without AI.

CEOs don't want to admit it but AI can't code anything non-trivial on its own.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#49

Post by MASNeo »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I really do differentiate between fast & vast changes of commodity code and critical sections. For the latter I’d explore with AI and then rewrite, line by line, with deliberate concern for all aspects relevant.

This does retain the joy of coding for me and takes away the pain of what is commodity and hard to do without tiresome meetings (mostly UI/UX and API/MCP as my products don’t differentiate on these).

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