71–80 of 110 posts
Writing code used to be free, anyone could do it with enough patience and knowledge, but now you have to pay hundreds of dollars to do this kind of thing with agents. It seems the barrier to entry has gotten more expensive.
e.g. I can ride a bike for free compared to driving a car where I have to pay for gas.
And their are pros and cons to both.
e.g. bikes are easier to park but not great in bad weather and vice versa
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you will always need a button pusher. whether it is the CEO, the product manager or the developer themselves. You will need some sort of overseer who will take accountability of the system that is generated by the AI.
>I think you will always need a button pusher. Okay. Is that job going to provide a competitive salary, with good benefits? More importantly, is it going to be personally fulfilling? Software developers who have adopted agentic coding are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire careers future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title "engin…
"Weavers who have agreed to tend a fourth loom are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire trade’s future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title “weaver.”"
"Handloom weavers who have adopted power looms are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire trade’s future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title “weaver.”"
Tale as old as time.
I don't understand people that say "I no longer code" as a good thing. I think it's safe to assume that if you studied computer science or similar you like to code. If not, why did you even study that? To me it just feels like you want to be a manager not an engineer This is like if a plumber said. I no longer do any construction, I just tell people what to do. Then you probably aren't a builder anymore, you are a fo…
It’s like saying “I no longer read or write assembly”; you are still solving problems but you are able to work in a higher level space to do it.
But if you have been hired to a position that requires reading and writing assembly, then I would hope that anyone applying likes to do specifically that. I don't want to solve problems at the manager level, I want to solve problems that require coding
> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension
Disclaimer: I'm an older dev out of the game. I could definitely see the bigger picture faster than I could type it (except for challenging tasks), but that typing time was also synergistic thinking time. Not unfrequently, I'd find a better design while writing the code. Even if it didn't make it into that codebase, it could be filed away for future reference. Edit: I recall reading somewhere that John Carmack doesn'…
I always found that the act of chugging the code helped to refine my thoughts along the way, including the big picture of it all. I've adapted in that I still have agents do most of the heavy lifting of code writing. But it still requires me to be invested in the details, which can't happen at the scale people discuss when they're talking about full on agentic development.
> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension
I've heard this reported, but it's hard to imagine it. The biggest bottleneck for me has always been hammock time[1]. 1. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
I often found myself impatient in getting something I knew would work to actually work, and it was always due to the tiresome fractal of complexities that any non-trivial task involves, like looking up an API or working around the quirks of some dependency.
On a related note, this is also why I find AI-assisted coding so efficient: I have the code visualized in my head to a decent level of detail, and so reviewing the AI's output is a breeze; it's like doing a semantic diff of what I had visualized and what it produced, and so any issues are glaring and easy to spot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's definitely skill rot that happens -- but there are also new skills to learn. Dependency on tools is not a new problem, though, is it? Agents definitely run amok on code bases, create bloat, needless complexity, etc. However, they enable many people to do so much more than they could without them, at least in the moment, that they're not going to go away.
Yeah, I am also feeling the rot and do not like it one bit. However, the world does not revolve around my feelings, so I have adapted and fully embraced it. That being said, I think AI took away 90% of the enjoyment I got from the job of Software Engineer. It isn't just the code writing, it was the space to go deep and immerse myself fully to solve a problem. I think there is still a need to problem solve at differen…
AI is completely sucking the enjoyment out of my work.
It's like they invented a robot that can build whatever you want out of Legos. You'll never have to touch your Legos again! /s
I feel a really odd dissonance with all these accounts. I have access to top models via Cursor at work. Every time I think to myself, here’s a tedious but well defined task, with clear success criteria, where you can achieve a lot with persistent iterations. I’ll give it to Claude to do. First, it takes me ages to describe the task properly. All these clear success criteria, well, instead of writing code from a clear…
This is similar to my experience when cursor first came out. But now it's even trickier because LLM actually writes working code that pass the test. The issue is when i dig in deeper, there's often small security or design issues that will cause problem down the road when the app gets more traffic. These issues are usually in really tedious places that I didn't bother to describe what to do to the agent
Right but that is someone else's problem. Or if that's something you will be call upon to answer, "that's just LLM did" is a fine answer in most companies where AI use has been mandated.
> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension
The research, the understanding, the planning, the design, all of it's iterations, the testing, all of it's iterations, debugging etc.
'I see the code and need to get it down' is a key thing obviously but a smaller part.
With better abstractions, we'll be putting 'architectural ideas' in our head, instead of algorithmic.
I have stopped reading blog posts for 6 months now! Since Fable-1337-B4242 agents became so good at reading that I delegated this load-bearing task. Once I became weak and read a paragraph, but I was reminded that reading is too laborious. After reading this blog post for me, Fable-1337-B4242 asked me if I also wanted to create a load-bearing plain text website like exe.dev using agentic forces.