301–310 of 475 posts
Dude's an engineering manager who codes maybe 5% of the time and his joy is decreasing. AI is not the problem, it's being an engineering manager.
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I replaced "code" for "singing" to make a point. > This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love singing and thus hate AI-assisted singing, and people who hate singing and thus love AI-assisted singing. > Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their singing, are probably the singers who are already outputting the worst singing right now. The p…
I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it. Much less uncommon to find people working in IT who hate the specific work of their jobs. And I think we do tend to (rightfully) look down on e.g. singers who lip-sync concerts or use autotune to sing at pitches they otherwise can'…
Another analogy would be with sound engineering. I've met sound engineer who hate their job as they would rather play music. They are also the ones whose jobs are likely to be replaced by AI. And I would argue that the argument stand stills. AI Sound Engineers who hate working on sound are often the bad sound engineers.
Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…
I don't really get any joy from the act of coding, but I also take a lot of pride in doing a good job.
Cutting corners and producing sloppy work is anathema to me, even when I don't really enjoy the work itself
Any work worth doing is worth doing a good job on, even if I don't enjoy the work itself
Typing isn't the fun part of it for me. It's a necessary evil to realize a solution.
The fun part of being an engineer for me is figuring out how it all should work and fit together. Once that's done - I already basically have all of the code for the solution in my head - I've just got to get it out through my fingers and slog through all the little ways it isn't quite right, doesn't satisfy x or y best practice, needs to be reshaped to accommodate some legacy thing it has to integrate that is utterly uninteresting to me, etc.
In the old model, I'd enjoy the first few hours or days of working on something as I was designing it in my mind, figuring out how it was all going to work. Then would come the boring part. Toiling for days or weeks to actually get all the code just so and closing that long-tail gap from 90% done (and all interesting problems solved) to 100% done (and all frustrating minutia resolved).
AI has dramatically reduced the amount of time the unsatisfying latter part of a given effort lasts for me. As someone with high-functioning ADD, I'm able to stay in the "stimulation zone" of _thinking_ about the hard / enjoyable part of the problem and let AI do (50-70%, depending on domain / accuracy) of the "typing toil".
Really good prompts that specify _exactly_ what I want (in technical terms) are important and I still have to re-shape, clean up, correct things - but it's vastly different than it was before AI.
I'm seeing on the horizon an ability to materialize solutions as quickly as I can think / articulate - and that to me is very exciting.
I will say that I am ruthlessly pragmatic in my approach to development, focusing on the most direct solution to meet the need. For those that obsesses over beautiful, elegant code - personalizing their work as a reflection of their soul / identity or whatever, I can see how AI would suck all the joy from the process. Engineering vs. art, basically. AI art sucks and I expect that's as true for code as it is for anything else.
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> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either. So if someone generates…
Where do you draw that line though? If you're talking about a person using an LLM, or some other ML system, to help generate their music then the LLM is really just a tool for that person. I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done. Should I not be allowed to do that professionally if I'm not actually the one achieving that speed or carrying capacity? Personally my concerns wi…
If you drive a car 80mph you don't get to claim you are a good runner
Similarly if you use an LLM to generate 10k lines of code, you don't get to claim you are a good programmer
Regardless of the outcome being the "same"
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I mean, the training data also has a cutoff date and changed beyond that are not reflected in the code suggestions. Also, I know that people love to joke on modern software and JS in particular. But if you take react code from 2020 and drop it into a new react codebase it still works. Even class based components work. Yes, if you jumped on the newest framework bandwagon every time stuff will break all the time, but A…
True. But LLMs have access to the web. I’ve told ChatGPT plenty of times to verify an SDK API or if I knew the API was new, I just gave it a link to the documentation. This was mostly around various AWS SDKs
I ran this prompt (and others like it) and it actually worked!
This code needs to be upgraded to the new
recommended JavaScript library from
Google. Figure out what that is and
then look up enough documentation to
port this code to it
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> it's a collosal waste of my time > LLM can do it faster, better, and cost me near nothing. And this is one the thing I'm skeptical about. The above use case is a symptom of all code and no design. It is a waste of time because you're putting yourself in a corner, architecture wise. Kinda like building on a crooked foundation. I've never done refactoring where I'm writing a lot of code, it's mostly just copy-paste a…
yes, that is one aspect of it. 1) refactoring. copy paste, re-arrange, extract, delete and rebuild the connection. i have the mental model and tell the LLM do do it across multiple files or classes. does it way faster and exactly how i would do it given the right prompt which is just a huge file that dictates how things are structured, style, weird edge cases i encountered as time goes on. 2) new features or sections…
A lot of these discussions focus on craft in engineering and there's lots of merit there regarding AI tools and how they change that process, but I've found that folks who enjoy both the product side of things and the engineering side of things are thriving while those who were very engineering focused understandably feel apprehensive.
I will say, in my day job, which is often at startups, I have to focus more on the business / product side just given the phase of the company. So, I get joy from engineering craft in side projects or other things I work on in my own time to scratch the itch.
Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…
Some like proving and deriving, for others it's a tool to solve other problems
This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.
Cant one enjoy both? After all, coding with AI in practice is still coding, just with a far higher intensity.
You may get to the same destination, but it is not the same activity