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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

#371

Post by metaltyphoon »

lelanthran wrote: post #301
shafoshaf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it. With AI, it i…

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code. Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

> in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.

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

#372

Post by varjag »

pixl97 wrote: post #103
52-6F-62 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts". Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit togeth…

The software world pretty much demanded this outcome. Go back 10 years and post "SWE's should form labor unions" Then watch as your post drops to [dead] and people scream "How dare you rob me of theoretical millions of dollars I'll be making". I wonder how many of these same downvoters are now worried about getting replaced with AI.

Let's keep it real. No union would save your jobs against a manyfold productivity gain of machines.

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

#373

Post by dsiegel2275 »

Wow this hits home - I just turned 51 and I also started coding at age 7, writing BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.

I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what programming was.

When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game. We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it - maybe just the first few "rooms".

Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.

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

#374

Post by tonymet »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #369

Programming is not art for me. I do not find it useful to gold plate solutions. I prefer getting the job done, sometimes by any means necessary for "the vehicle" to continue running. AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code. I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or docume…

Perhaps detractors just gave up and didn't bother improving, but I'm able to prompt the AI to write excellent code. And it's very easy to correct when it's gone awry . This idea that all AI code is bad is just the ego talking.

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

#375

Post by icedchai »

r_lee wrote: post #362
icedchai wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for both. Give AI the boilerplate, save the exciting stuff for you.

but are employers going to be fine with that?

That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.

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

#376

Post by jojva »

samiv wrote: post #138
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 just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

Your comment is interesting because it shows how engineers view their work: through the product, i.e the why, or through the craft, i.e the how.

What you consider "exciting", as a theoretical gardener, is the act of taking care of the plants. What OP finds it exciting is that they may now get a team of gardeners that'll build a Versailles-like garden for free.

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

#377

Post by jbeninger »

akdev1l wrote: post #363
sho_hn wrote: post #14

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…

I’m not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the point I’d consider leaving the industry entirely I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all

I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete.

When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.

YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.

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

#378

Post by bastardoperator »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #369

Programming is not art for me. I do not find it useful to gold plate solutions. I prefer getting the job done, sometimes by any means necessary for "the vehicle" to continue running. AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code. I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or docume…

I'm yet to see perfect code from a human or ai. Most of the people I work with that want everything to be in a perfect state typically get way less done. To your point, sometimes we are just mechanics and that's okay.

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

#379

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

lelanthran wrote: post #350
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. It's very sad, for me. Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games. I'm looking at all these people proudly showin…

My job for the last 8 years has involved

Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.

The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.

Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.

While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.

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