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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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51–60 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#51
OK, but if you can't find out how to use new tools well, how good are you really as a craftsperson?

"We've always done it this way" is the path of calcification, not of a vibrant craft. And there are certainly many ways you can use LLMs to craft better things, without slop and vibecoding.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#52

Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.

That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.

That's a silly take, just because they existed and were proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today, depending on the context.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#53
Some people code to talk and don't want anything said for them. That's okay. Photography and paintings landed in different places with different purposes.

But all of Programming isn't the same thing. We just need new names for different types of programmers. I'm sure there were farmers that lamented the advent of machines because of how it threatened their identity, their connection to the land, etc....

but I want to personally thank the farmers who just got after growing food for the rest of us.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#54

Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.

I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.

Maybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#55

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't add value A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.

Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.

I don't think the character is that uncommon in the output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus generates an em-dash).

In fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--) gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily, which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the customary hair spaces around the em dash.

Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#57
To me, the most salient point was this:

> Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human intelligence.

As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't add value A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.

Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?

>The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives

They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#59
To be honest I already reached that identity crisis even before LLMs.

Nowadays many enterprise projects have become placing SaaS products together, via low code/no code integrations.

A SaaS product for the CMS, another one for assets, another for ecommerce and payments, another for sending emails, another for marketing, some edge product for hosting the frontend, finally some no code tools to integrate everything, or some serverless code hosted somewhere.

Welcome to MACH architecture.

Agents now made this even less about programming, as the integrations can be orchestrated via agents, instead of low code/no code/serverless.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#60

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

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