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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

#381

Post by lelanthran »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #379
lelanthran wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

You are not the first person to say things like this.

Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?

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

#382

Post by munificent »

small_model wrote: post #229
samiv wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The proper analogy would be you can now remove all weeds with the swipe of your hand and cut all your hedges with another swipe, you still are gardening you can do it quicker and therefore explore different possibilities.

For some, the feeling of pulling those weeds out is inseparable from the holistic experience they think of as "gardening".

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

#383

Post by _aavaa_ »

akdev1l wrote: post #366
reactordev wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today. Ask again in 6 months. A year.

People have been saying this for multiple years in a row now.

And it has been getting more true for years in a row.

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

#384

Post by lelanthran »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #371
lelanthran wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Great! I turn from a creator to a babysitter of creators. I'm not seeing the win here.

FWIW, I use LLMs extensively, but not to write the code, to rubber-duck. I have yet to have any LLM paired with any coding agent give me something that I would have written myself.

All the code is at best average. None of the smart stuff comes from them.

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

#385

Post by munificent »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #235
samiv wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away

What's so great about having 10 or 30 gardens?

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

#386

Post by akdev1l »

jbeninger wrote: post #377
akdev1l wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me

However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me

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

#387

Post by flowerthoughts »

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!

Well, the gardener isn't going to cut down your roses to the ground as they are about to go into bloom because s/he mistook it for the weed they were just working on.

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

#388

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #351
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AI" LLM don't write anything, but copied someones symbolic isomorphic work that could fit the expected definition in the reasoning model. Like all copyright submarines, your firm now runs the non-zero risk someone will sue for theft, or hit the product with a DMCA claim. What is the expected value of piracy versus actual business. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MalBJuI9O5k

Information wants to be free. No one in any administration now or in the future will ever go back to the "let's sue grandma for 1 trillion dollars" era of the early 2000s. Piracy is good and important for national security. ~~~(====3

>important for national security

Indeed, but people rarely stop to consider... "security for whom?"

Have a wonderful day =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4

Spaceballs (1987)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPkWZdluoUg

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

#389

Post by refset »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #146
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…

For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic". Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it. I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic

In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html

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

#390

Post by marttt »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #50

I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web. The author…

DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode internet is there (should you want online in the first place), and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a huge leap [1].

I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently.

Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul!

0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea... | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php

1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA

2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS

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