121–130 of 206 posts
The tool doesn’t invalidate the craft. If anything, what we’re mourning when AI “kills the passion” might be about identity.
Many programmers spent decades defining themselves as the person who knows how to do hard things
And it’s disorienting when that thing becomes easy.
Don't take it personally, but those are the worst kind of engineers in any real world business context. I watched those type of people ruining projects, companies by overengineering them to death.
On the bright side, such traits can make a positive impact in academic or research context.
Those who say they enjoy "building" with AI instead of coding are just outsourcing the coding part (while training the AI for outsourced company). It's nothing to enjoy, but yeah, you get the product, which is probably what people enjoy. Getting the product. It's like buying a IKEA furniture and you think you made it by merely assembling it. If you don't know IKEA effect, it's having a greater value for something tha…
Or maybe it still gives you the first, too. Maybe you get that from figuring out how to get the AI to produce the code you want, just like you got it from trying to get the compiler to produce the code you want.
Or maybe it depends on your personality and/or your view of your craft.
Anyway, the point is, people take pleasure in their work in different ways. Those who enjoy building with AI are probably not all lying. Some do enjoy it. And that is not a defect in them. It's fine for them to enjoy it. It's fine for you not to enjoy it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this. I recently wanted to monitor my vehicle batteries with a cheap BLE battery monitor from AliExpress (by getting the data into HomeAssistant). I could have spent days digging through BlueZ on a Raspberry Pi, or I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later. Yes, I gave up the chance to manually learn every layer of the stack. I’m fine with that. The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archa…
> I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later. That sounds really cool. You should share what you used. > The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem. I'm sympathetic to this view. It seems very pragmatic. After all, the reason we write software is not to move characters around a repo, but to solve problems, right? But here's my concern. Like a lot of people, I…
I find myself chatting through architectural problems with ChatGPT as I drive (using voice mode). I've continued to learn that way. I don't bother learning little things that I know won't do much for me, but I still do deep research and prototyping (which I can do 5x faster now) using AI as a supplement. I still provide AI significant guidance on the architecture/language/etc of what I want built, and that has come from my 20+ years in software.
This is is the project I was talking about. I prefer using codex day-to-day.
https://github.com/klinquist/HomeAssistant-Vehicle-Battery-M...
This is another fun project I recently built using AI:
> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me . I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and…
I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat retired last year. Looking for something new to do. Basic Java micro service with Spring Boot ands it is three hours of coding to write and read from a database and expose over REST interface. Two hours for a tests. Rest of the time is to set up environments, coupling everything, documentation. Two days is do-able if you have a good CI/CD template and your Azure/AWS is setup correctly.
I hope the companies you worked for had someone else taking care of security, as what you've described is a ransomware writer's wet dream.