641–646 of 646 posts
I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider. You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like go…
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> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, an…
If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.
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If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.
Very off topic but I think you would highly enjoy watching the movie "Perfect Days (2023)" directed by Wim Wenders. It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384
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Oh, you're not going to bait me into that one! "What is Art?" is the central 20th century aesthetic question, which no one ever answered to anyone else's satisfaction. Nowadays artists and critics have mostly stopped addressing it, because it's just exhausting, and everyone gets on with whatever it is they do. (But, yes: every profession can be Art is one of the answers some people propose! You can make your own mind…
> you're not going to bait me into that one! but it's you throwing around the term. e.g. "economically speaking, that's an art market" - in what sense? How do you define an "art market"? It all seems very tautological. > aesthetics-driven pursuit aesthetics can usually biased by utility, to the extent of being a proxy for it. You can find the aerodynamics of a aeroplane or hummingbird wing beautiful, but there is sti…
A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.
> How do you define an "art market"?
In the preceding sentence:
> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.
It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.
> consider only backend code.
Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?
I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.
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> LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this for several decades now.
So what? Just because you had one way to do something before, that means having a different way of doing it is useless? We have the C language, and it’s been letting people write applications for decades. Does that mean there’s no value in other programming languages?
That’s a ridiculous jump to a totally extreme conclusion that’s not supported by any message above. What does one even answer to this without getting sucked into a pointless argument?
I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally. Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun. What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want. I stopped reviewing the code at all. People on here are often saying how that's…
The ones that loves the technicity, the challenge of building something, putting complex things together, the puzzle part of creating something.
The ones that wants to have stuff build to use them, were coding was just a mean to an end. (DHH mentioned in his podcast with Lex Fridman, that he is more in this category)
For the later, AI is the perfect tool that could come around, removing that barrier that was stopping them to achieve their needs (which you appear to be part of, I'm saying this without no jugement)
The writer of the blog post is in the former category.