Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?

> I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft.

In reality, it’s probably closer to 1/100 of the people who claim they do. If genuinely love the craft, LLMs should be exciting. Imagine having an LLM to discuss ideas with, learn from, and use to expand your skills when we were learning stuff. Nothing stops anyone from coding for fun, learning new languages or frameworks, or exploring new design approaches.

The uncomfortable truth is that many who say they “love the craft”, loved probably more what came with mastering it... The salary, status, career prospects, and identity of being “the smart guy” with a rare and valuable skill. When that identity feels threatened, the reaction is understandable. But you know who really loves the craft? Amateurs. In the original sense of the word. People who pursue something simply because they love doing it.

ps. I believe companies will need knowledgeable engineers to drive the machine. LLMs are right most of the time, but not always, and someone still needs to know enough to catch the mistakes and, more importantly, specify what should be built in the first place. You can’t write a good spec without understanding the language of the system you’re specifying, the system itself, etc.

And there’s an entire ecosystem emerging around LLM engineering growing fast: infrastructure, inference optimization, model evaluation, token efficiency proxies, tooling, and more. Even setting up a solid development environment has become quite complex (tmux, agents, editor, etc). So I don’t think this a black and white situation where “LLMs will replace engineers”.

> How do you feel?

My experience is all encompassing. AI has attacked and destroyed almost every aspect of my previous identity over the last 2 years, as well as all of my achievements. My life today as a result is very different. Almost all of the things I used to do for fun or to pass time I no longer do.

I documented this in another comment recently so won't rehash but if you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334614

For me it's all of the writing and little projects I created which are now basically useless that hurts the most. I can try to find other ways to be useful going forward but I'll never get back decades of lost time. I have so much pointless knowledge polluting my head.

I'm a massive AI doomer though and fairly sure RSI is nearing or maybe here. Given this the next few years are likely to make any current concerns about identity seem so small and silly that I'm trying to focus on the things that matter and trying to live in the moment.

I'm basically living like I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer – just trying to absorb as much of life as I can and not worrying too much about the future which has been taken from me.

I have been shadowing this thread for a while. My past engagement on hackernews have largely towards GenAI, programming & what this industry looks like.

First, it's good to know I am not alone in feeling that a certain world, no longer exists. This is the world where when given a problem, you would spend maybe 3-4 hours scoping it out, doing some research, maybe drawing up some diagrams and then jumping into the code. Coding itself was a necessary part of this process, where it was meditative. You were in this zone between deep and shallow work. It's odd to "reminisce" about coding as if it was such a beautiful thing, in reality it was hard. Required a lot of elbow grease, but it was fulfilling (I wrote 10k LoC over 2 weeks, it isn't about LoC as a metric of good code, it was more about the effort put in felt really tangible)

The world today, is fundamentally different. Today coding is really cheap, even disregarding the best SOTA models, OSS models are catching up in how consistent of an output they produce. Note the word "consistent", I won't say the code wirten by Opus or Sol is "good", but it's consistent enough to where with the right infrastructure around it (aka harnesses) you can get it to work really well.

2 years back, saying "LLMs don't produce good code" was objectively true. They were good for maybe a function, heck I remember AI straight up producing incorrect logic. Today with the right context, the "code quality" (interestignly, quality is a human metric, maintainability would be more apt, and the cost of building a change) is upto par or even better than what I would write on the first iteration.

Given that the cost of coding is now 0, my job becomes to solve problems, in the best way possible, WHILE directing the HLD/LLD of the system to understand the limitations of what I have built. The latter, I only do because it's much faster knwoing a limitation in a codebase than having an agent "recongize" it through a bunch of tests, and loops (it's cheaper too) -- THAT is where my experience really shines, knowing which patterns to apply to what problem and expect what results. Heck, we live in a time, where I can trivially have an LLM run experiments to quantify 3 other approaches at the same time.

Fundamentally what I do, is managing context, scoping problems & requirements, understanding limitations and directing the codebase (again, also drawing from experience, since an LLM may arbitiarily do something which leads to increasing entropy in the codebase)

Think of it like this; If software engineer, was like maintaing a garden, then 5 years back the process was -- think about how you want your garden to look, with this in mind begin planting the right seeds, pruning the bushes, weeding the overgrowth. Today, I have robot to do all that stuff for me, that leaves me a WHOLE lot of time to plan out my garden, thus, today, I can maintain an entire ecosystem instead of a garden. Not the best analogy, but it models my fear of the LLM not "pruning it right" when in the grand scheme of things, it may not matter at all.

Whew, that was long. I just wanted to get my thoughts out haha