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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#111

Post by Lerc »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

I'm feeling the same.

AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga.

An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#112

Post by rdiddly »

alt227 wrote: post #51

I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age. All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things. For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories. I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can…

Yes, I think that's how it will go, like all those other industries. There will be an artisanal market, that's much smaller, where the (fewer) participants charge higher prices. So it'll (ironically?) end up being just another wealth concentrator. A few get richer doing artisanal work while most have their wage depressed and/or leave the market.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#113

Post by kccqzy »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #104
netsharc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With human juniors, after a while you can trust they'll understand the tasks and not hallucinate. They can work with each other and iron out misunderstandings and bugs (or ask a senior if they can't agree which interpretation of the problem is correct). With AI, there's none of that, and even after many months of working together, there's still possibility that their last work is hallucination/their simulation of und…

The equivalent of "employee development" with AI is just the release schedule of new models, I guess.

But the release of new models are generic. They don’t represent understanding in your specific codebase. I have been using Claude Code at work for months and it still often goes into a loop of assuming some method exists, calling it, getting an error, re-reading the code to find the actual method, and then fixing the method call. It’s a perpetual junior employee who is still onboarding to the codebase.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#114

Post by alt227 »

summa_tech wrote: post #107
alt227 wrote: post #51

I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age. All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things. For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories. I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can…

I think the issue at the core of the analogy is that factories, traditional factories, excel at making a ton of one thing (or small variations thereof). The big productivity gains came from highly reliable, repeatable processes that do not accommodate substantial variation. This rigidity of factory production is what drives the existence of artisan work: it can always easily distinguish itself from the mass product.…

What assembly lines and factories did for other manufacturing processes is to make it feasable for any person to be able to make those things. In the past only very skilled professionals were able to create such things, but mechanisation and breaking down manufacturing processes into small chunks made the same things be able to be achieved by low skilled workers.

IMO that is exactly what is happening here. Ai is making coding apps possible for the normal person. Yes they will need to be supervised and monitored, just like workers in a factory. But groups of normal low skilled workers will be able to create large pieces of software via ai, whic has only ever been possible by skilled teams of professinoals before.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#116

Post by Joel_Mckay »

zero_shift wrote: post #74

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things? About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills. Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An indus…

People get bored if they don't find real meaning in their work.

https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

Fact is, the tech sector is filled with folks that find zero joy in what they do, chose a career for financial reasons, and end up being miserable to everyone including themselves.

The ex-service people would call these folks entitled Shitbirds, as no matter the situation some will complain about everything. Note, everyone still does well in most large corporate settings, but some are exhausting to be around on a project. =3

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#117

Post by benlivengood »

The contrast between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now. Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#118

Post by sisnxb »

pixl97 wrote: post #108
newsoftheday wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacksmiths were replaced by factories which produced deterministic products with 100% predictability. AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.

>with 100% predictability. Not sure what world you're from, but lots of products get sent back to the manufacture because they break.

[dead]

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#119

Post by qalmakka »

I am much younger than the author, but I've been coding for most of my life and I find close to no joy in using AIs. For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the sake of it. It was always more about the journey than the end goal, and AI basically hollows out all of the interesting bits about coding. It feels like skipping straight to the end of a book, or somewhat like that.

I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots in my experience turns developing software into something that feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine, but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead of complaining about it.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#120

Post by alex_suzuki »

TimPC wrote: post #57

I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agent…

I wonder what other “crevices” (as the author put it) exist.

Another commentor mentioned embedded, and after a brief phase of dabbling in that, mainly with nRF5x micros, I tend to agree. Less training data and obtuse tooling.

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