Why do people use the ' — ' all the time now? It's not a proper English separator.
> Why do people use the
> ' — ' all the time now?
> It's not a proper English
> separator.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
661–670 of 697 posts
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#662Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#663Earlier 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. I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them. That said,…
In my experience, the vast majority of people can't even muster the hubris to think they can understand software at such a basic level, it doesn't matter if GenAI did all the heavy lifting sadly.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are not understanding the point. AI has to be properly supervised because it makes mistakes. It been well over a decade (ironically until AI) that I have been responsible for an implementation small enough that I could do with my own two hands within the allotted time by myself. People also require supervision. Now if you are making more or as many mistakes as the AI, then you should look for a new career. Righ…
> Are you really saying that you can keep more of the code in your head than AI with a one million token context window or that you can read and understand various markdown files in a repo faster? Of course. A million tokens is 50,000 lines of code. That's nothing. It's not that you memorize a million lines of code. It's that you develop a solid mental model of how those lines of code are organized, how they work tog…
> It's not that you memorize a million lines of code. It's that you develop a solid mental model of how those lines of code are organized
As you do when you are leading a team or are more concerned with the overall system - people, business processes, architecture, etc.
I don’t need to write every single if statement to do that
> But the LLM with that million token context window has that 50,000 line memory and then its general training data. That's it.
Absolutely no person us keeping the entire 50K lines of code in memory at the same time - they have a mental model of how the components interact. You don’t lose that mental model when you use LLMs.
> So your "value" as a developer who is using AI is to bring that mental model with you so you can supervise the AI and guide it to do surgery on that million line codebase with it's puny 50,000 line knowledge of your codebase.
Isn’t that what I’ve been saying the entire time?
> But when you stop coding, you begin to lose your mental model. So, yes, there is a short term burst of productivity as your mental model fades
Is you scope of responsibility only what you code yourself? Before LLMs and before I got into consulting, I was responsible for the architecture of a startup with three teams and I did my own MVPs to prove out concepts so I wouldn’t be an “architect astronaught”. I went months with out a line of code. But I did understand the system.
Absolutely no one is paying me to write for loops or understand every line of code. I get paid …decently…for understanding systems. The business, the personalities, conflicting priorities, teasing out the level of technical maturity of the customer, designing the architecture, addressing cross cutting concerns, the modularity of the code etc. the code is no more important that I do it by hand today than it is for me to be writing assembly (or even c) instead of using a compiler.
It’s also not important I know how AWS procures hardware when I submit a YAML file like it was when I was partially responsible for an on prem server room with a whopping 3TB SAN in 2004.
My “mental model” is based on again the processes I’ve perfected to go from requirements of a large implementation -> happy paying customer from an empty git repo and an empty AWS.
The “code” is a minuscule part of any large project. In most enterprise companies that can be outsourced to lower paid people in non US countries. There is no moat around “I know how the for loops work”. For now there is a moat to being able to fly out to a customer site and work with “the business” or on a Zoom call and being able to understand systems. The people who pay you to help you make money or save them money don’t care
But I better be able to explain to the PMO where the project stands, to legal whether we are meeting our contractual obligations, to sales/account management whether the customer is happy and will pay us.
On the customer side, I need to be able to intelligently answer questions that come my way from the security folks, the DevOps department, the bean counters and the development department who have to maintain the project.
Do I need to understand the why and how the system interacts and the behavior of the system? Of course, do I need to know how every for loop was written instead of a while loop? No, I don’t know that if I have a team under me or if I’m responsible for validating the Salesforce integration we outsourced (when I was at a startup).
Coding - in enterprise dev - has been an undifferentiated commodity where the comp hasn’t kept up with inflation in a decade. I saw this happening and was the reason I aggressively moved up the stack as far as scope and responsibility. With LLMs I can take on much larger scoped projects by myself and get them done in 40 hours
> You have to keep coding in a codebase to maintain your understanding of it. It really is just like having the LLM do your homework for you. Use the LLM to help you learn, to help you do your work, but keep doing the exercises yourself, so that your mental model remains fresh.
I graduated from college in 1996. I’ve been assigning other people to do a large part of my “homework” for over a decade. That could be other in house developers or another company to do things like integrations with Salesforce, Workday etc. now it’s Claude and Codex.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#665I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the same time as the OP even if I'm a few years older. Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also: This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The…
Man your first computer was the first compute Linus Torvalds had.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate to sound like a broken record. But I consider my skillset at 51 all of the things I said that involve getting from signed contract to happy customer at the end. I’m actually slowly working on moving even further up and becoming halfway competent at pre-sales. You cdn substitute customer for “the business”. When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the ent…
> When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. For me, the coding part is not even small, it's non-existent! I still feel that the coding skills I have make me much more valuable.
As a manager though, I bet you understand the architecture, the politics, the business, the security posture, the financial implications, etc of everything you are responsible for.
Wouldn’t you agree that your skillset is more valuable than your coders? Again with the assumption that you aren’t working in BigTech or equivalent where every optimization is at a scale that it matters.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell.
No, it's not. If you want things to stay the same forever, you shouldn't go into technology, art, or gardening. Try plumbing, masonry, or religion.
I just actually thought that many of the great artists absolutely did paint, sculpt, or draw their creations "by hand", themselves. I suppose they used tools: the brush, chisel, pencil. Not sure how comparable those are to having an LLM write code for you.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never been asked for coverage as a metric or target, at least not by managers. Most of the… drudge that you describe seems to come from fellow developers. These are self-inflicted wounds by the “journeyman idealists”, making us all perpetual beginners. (That said, I do like unit tests and I think code reviews can be useful for sparing if you have a good vibe and trust in the team.)
I have seen coworkers, who are otherwise very nice people, become rather nasty when given some authority over other's code in the form of code reviews. The code review turns into "this is how I would have written it, rewrite it." What we did before code reviews: we would get together with our fellow engineers in front of a whiteboard and knock out the structure of the code one was tasked with. We'd argue whether cach…
I understand. It’s a great reply.
To my dismay, I’ve never worked in a place like the first one you’ve described. Managers have certainly been confident enough in me to just let me ship stuff I built alone, or obviously that a team built without the usual red tape. Your model is very intriguing, I’ll try to implement something similar if I’m ever again able.
It’s true that code reviewers can become feral and the smallest detail a source of contention. I’ve had otherwise good team leads completely rewrite my code after accepting a review. It’s okay, maybe it wasn’t that good. Egos hurt and get hurt.
About QA: well, companies — I hope — eventually pay the price. Apple’s image of software quality now contrasted with a company that lost the trust of power users. QA and unit tests are complementary. If anything, it’s acceptance and integration tests that hurt QA, but I’ve never seen these 2 done properly anywhere.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#669I retired a month ago at 74. Like you I've used languages in anger that few these days have heard of (S3 anyone?), and design techniques that somehow seem to be devalued.
Claude and it's kin remind me of junior "just out of university" developers with piles of knowledge but no appreciation of the real world impact of anything. Of long conversations about edge cases and why they matter, extensive error-checking and logging.
The last place I worked had (some) users eager to be their own developer to get things done that much quicker. These are often the same users unable to accurately define what they really want, assuming that the nearby BA will understand and the magic will happen. They haven't worked out, and may not be interested in learning that they will be their own BA and that the uncertainties in their vision will be baked into the final offering.
In reality, I'm glad to be out, the fossil suffering the effects of the tools whilst unable to influence anything.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not. If you want things to stay the same forever, you shouldn't go into technology, art, or gardening. Try plumbing, masonry, or religion.
I just actually thought that many of the great artists absolutely did paint, sculpt, or draw their creations "by hand", themselves. I suppose they used tools: the brush, chisel, pencil. Not sure how comparable those are to having an LLM write code for you.
The reality is that many if not most of the big names had apprentices who did a lot of the actual work. Art historians spend a lot of time arguing about whether a given Leonardo was really a product of Leonardo's hand, for example.
This quick-and-dirty prompt returns results in line with my own understanding (which of course doesn't necessarily mean the exact figures are correct): https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce93b-b66c-800b-9e41-91ccab8eba... The artist I was primarily thinking of when I wrote that comment was Chihuly, whose workshop is famously more like a factory than a studio.