> This is the part I struggle with when I think about it. Years of identity rests on “I am someone who writes code”. That identity is now contingent on a tool stack that’s three years old and could regress. If it breaks, the identity goes with it, and I’m fine with that.
> I think that’s the most honest signal I can give about what I actually valued. The thing I was doing all those years wasn’t writing code. I was making decisions and watching them become real. The agents make that loop shorter. Take the agents away and the loop becomes too long again. I’d rather do something else.
What's really interesting to me and I'm honestly curious as to how many people are in the same boat as I am vs the author is that I have the same feeling and I'm not ok with it
I think if LLM's disappeared tomorrow I could go back to coding without them, however there'd be that transition of scraping the rust off and honestly I don't like that
It's really discomforting to feel like the codebase I'm working on is getting ever more foreign and strange, especially as LLM's when they communicate with you are persuasive that they are making things better, and they do work, for a given value of work anyway, it's really hard at times to tell looks right from is right
I've come up with some strategies that mitigate this to a degree and I'm slowly trying to find more
I think a lot of people are taking refuge in practices, but aren't entirely coming to terms with the actual scale of the difficulty of writing correct code, skating by on it being useful, which don't get me wrong isn't a bad thing, our clients pay us for creating useful things
Not turning flops into heat
However I get the uneasy feeling like our tools are very inadequate
Types measure consistency, not correctness
Tests and code coverage are very easy to game, and unless you've put in the discipline of creating something on the order of sqlite's test suite, there's likely to be an ever growing pool of latent footguns sitting in the code you're making
And I'm not saying this to be negative or alarmist, at the end of the day it depends on what your goals are, and most working devs and startup folks are just trying to ship
And we can't really argue that for many, they do help do that
You will ship
Something at least
I find myself in this odd position of acknowledging that the coding world has shifted in ways that I find exciting and strange, and as much as I've begun to understand how to navigate this new environment, the part of me that felt deeply grounded in the things that I built is still feeling disquiet