211–214 of 214 posts
"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."
No A.I. would ever think more than a millisecond about a comma, it's pure data retrieval for it. "how many percent of text there is a coma after this word, how many didn't ? ok, done."
My favorite thing about this article is that it was released the exact same day as Claude 4 Opus. If it's satire, it's brilliant: because most of the comments I see (here and elsewhere) are clearly written by people who tried agentic coding before Opus 4, and haven't given it a fair shake over the ensuing five days. IMO the most important engineering skill in 2025 isn't low-level programming, or the craft of debuggin…
The things that's most often missed in these discussions that "writing code" is the end artefact. It doesn't take into account the endless tradeoffs made in producing the said artefact - the journey to get there. Just try implementing a feature with a junior, in a mildly complex codebase and you'd catch all the unconscious tradeoffs that you're making as an experienced developer. AI has some concept of what these tra…
This resonates with me, for sure; both the benefits and the drawbacks of copilot. But while I think kids and hackers were artisans, engineers were always just engineers. The amazing technical challenges they had to solve to create some of the foundational technologies we have today, exist because they had to solve those challenges. Looking at only these and saying "that's how things used to be" is survivorship bias.
I feel privileged to be able to say that as a software engineer who's been doing it the hard way for 20+ years, I relish the hard problems. The CRUD app updates are unbearable without the random in-between challenges that bend my mind. The rare recursive algorithm, the application of some esoteric knowledge I actually learned in college, actually having to do big-o estimates. These are the gems of my career that keep…