We mourn our craft

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.

> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me.

I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.

If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option, please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up when the response is bad.

Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.

One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and LISP) instead of using assembly language.

We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!

We have CNC machines, and we still have sculptors.

Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries.

I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.

The death of a means to an end is the birth of an end itself.

When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of programming/computing is going to be interesting.

You know who else mourned the loss of craft? People that don't like PHP and Wordpress because they lower the barrier to entry to creating useful stuff while also leaving around a fair amount of cruft and problems that the people that use them don't understand how to manage.

Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases, ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the age of AI.

All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is changing as it always has. The only constant I've ever experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for me.

I am feeling this loss. I spent most of mu career scrupulously avoiding leadership positions because what I really like is the simple joy of making things with my own two hands.

Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most people are nowadays.

And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are - like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least, soon enough it won’t be. I can fret about deskilling all I like, but it seems that soon enough these skills won’t be particularly valuable except as a form of entertainment.

Perhaps the coding agents won’t be able to make certain things or use certain techniques. That was the case for textile manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we see it in each others’ work.

It’s not a terrible future, I suppose, in à long enough view. The world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and other similar points in history, not until after we get through another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won’t start quite so many wars while they enjoy their power trips.

Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety, bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse.

Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.

I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.

As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.

If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.

Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.

I'll believe it when I start seeing examples of good and useful software being created with LLMs or some increase in software quality. So far it's just AI doom posting, hype bloggers that haven't shipped anything, anecdotes without evidence, increase in CVEs, increase in outages, and degraded software quality.

Oh no, my engineering profession requires me to use new engineering techniques due to advancements produced by engineering. Quality cringe.

The thing he has spent his whole career doing unto others he finally did into himself

Two years ago I decided to give up my career as an industry researcher to pursue a tenure-track professor position at a community college. One of the reasons I changed careers is because I felt frustrated with how research at my company changed from being more self-directed and driven by longer-term goals to being directed by upper management with demands for more immediate productization.

I feel generative AI is being imposed onto society. While it is a time-saving tool for many applications, I also think there are many domains where generative AI needs to be evaluated much more cautiously. However, there seems to be relentless pressure to “move fast and break things,” to adopt technology due to its initial labor-saving benefits without fully evaluating its drawbacks. That’s why I feel generative AI is an imposition.

I also resent the power and control that Big Tech has over society and politics, especially in America where I live. I remember when Google was about indexing the Web, and I first used Facebook when it was a social networking site for college students. These companies became successful because they provided useful services to people. Unfortunately, once these companies gained our trust and became immensely wealthy, they started exploiting their wealth and power. I will never forget how so many Big Tech leaders sat at Trump’s second inauguration, some of whom got better seats than Trump’s own wife and children. I highly resent OpenAI’s cornering of the raw wafer market and the subsequent exorbitant hikes in RAM and SSD prices.

Honestly, I have less of an issue with large language models themselves and more of an issue with how a tiny handful of powerful people get to dictate the terms and conditions of computing for society. I’m a kid who grew up during the personal computing revolution, when computation became available to the general public. I fell for the “computers for the rest of us,” “information at your fingertips” lines. I wanted to make a difference in the world through computing, which is why I pursued a research career and why I teach computer science.

I’ve also sat and watched research industry-wide becoming increasingly driven by short-term business goals rather than by long-term visions driven by the researchers themselves. I’ve seen how “publish-and-perish” became the norm in academia, and I also saw DOGE’s ruthless cuts in research funding. I’ve seen how Big Tech won the hearts and minds of people, only for it to leverage its newfound power and wealth to exploit the very people who made Big Tech powerful and wealthy.

The tech industry has changed, and not for the better. This is what I mourn.

"Glorified TSA agent" is a rather gloomy, low-agency take on it. You both ask for what you want and verify the results.

These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence.

I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using?

The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself.

I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!

> They can write code better than you or I can

Speak for yourself. They produce shit code and have terrible judgment. Otherwise we wouldn't need to babysit them so much.

Thanks to the person who wrote this. It resonates very strongly with me.

You can still do your craft as you did it before, but you can't expect to be paid for it as much as before.

Many have mentioned woodworking as an analogy from a personal perspective, but for me the important perspective is that of consumers.

Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress.

A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value.

How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.

But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die.

The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels.

As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.

This discussion is like the discourse about work from home/return to office.

I don't mourn our craft.

> "I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it."

I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow.

If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine.

But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose.

It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous.

If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.

And all that time spent doing leetcode? Yeah, THAT was time Well Spent.... ;-)

1. it isn't that bad

2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i provide very specific prompts

3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay your bills every month is something i could do when my parents paid my bills

These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or Opus producing the code.

It makes me sad to read posts like this. If it is a necessary step for you on the journey from denial to acceptance to embracing the new state of the world, then sure, take your time.

But software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction so that we don't repeat ourselves and make each next step even more powerful.

Just yesterday we were pair programming with a talented junior AI developer. Today we are treating them as senior ones and can work with several in parallel. Very soon your job will not be pair programming and peer reviewing at all, but teaching a team of specialized coworkers to work on your project. In a year or two we will be assembling factories of such agents that will handle the process from taking your requirements to delivering and maintaining complex software. Our jobs are going to change many more times and much more often than ever.

And yet there will still be people finding solace in hand-crafting their tools, or finding novel algorithms, or adding the creativity aspect into the work of their digital development teams. Like people lovingly restoring their old cars in their garage just for the sake of the process itself.

And everything will be just fine.

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

No they cannot, And an AI bro squeezing every talking point into a think piece while pretending to have empathy doesn't change that. You just want an exit, and you want it fast.

To me, it’s super exciting to play ping pong with ideas up until I arrive at an architecture and interfaces, that I am fine with.

My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code.

And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.

That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about.

Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job.

I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.

The king is dead; long live the king.

> wait six months.

I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!"

I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games, chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I could see and experience the value of the internet immediately. It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible.

LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved." It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs—and there are always bugs.

Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.

For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money. That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open source projects that would love to have your help, but the days of making big money may be drawing to a close.

Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.

I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing.

Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it.

What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-paid remuneration, to write software line-by-line.

I’ll not pretend that I don’t get the point, but it feels like the lamentation of a baker, tailor, shoemaker, or smith, missing the days of old.

And yet, most people prefer a world with affordable bread, clothes, footware, and consumer goods.

Will the world benefit the most from “affordable” software? Maybe yes, maybe not, there are many arguments on both sides. I am more concerned the impact on the winners and losers, the rich will get more rich and powerful, while the losers will become even more destitute.

Yet, my final point would be: it is better or worse to live in a world in which software is more affordable and accessible?

December a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT I did Advent of Code in Rust. It was very difficult, had never done the full month before, barely knew Rust and kept getting my ass kicked by it. I spent a full Saturday afternoon solving one of the last problems of the month, and it was wonderful. My head hurt and I was reading weird Wikipedia articles and it was a blast. Nothing is stopping me from doing that sort of thing again, and I feel like I might need to, to counteract the stagnation I feel at times mentally when it comes to coding. That spark is still in there I feel, buried under all the slop, and it would reappear if I gave it the chance, I hope. I have been grieving for the last years I think and only recently have I come to terms with the changes to my identity that llm's have wrought.

I found my love for programming in high school, dreaming of helping the world with my beautiful craftsmanship, but now i really really need the fokken money. Both are true!

So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well, then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess

Quick questionnaire. Please reply with how much you like/use AI and what kind of programming you do.

I wonder if there are some interesting groupings.

LLMs have made a lot of coding challenges less painful: Navigating terrible documentation, copilot detecting typos, setting up boilerplate frontend components, high effort but technically unchallenging code completions. Whenever I attempted LLMs for tools I’m not familiar with I found it to be useful with setting things up but felt like I had to do good old learning the tool and applying developer knowledge to it. I wonder if senior developers could use LLMs in ways that work with them and not against them. I.e create useful code that has guardrails to avoid slop

Another post saying 6 more months.. i’m so tired of these

Some people say that working with an agent or an agents orchestrator is like being a technical lead. But I've been a technical lead for quite a while, and the experience of working with an agent doesn't even come close. I think that when people talk about the agents' coding abilities they're talking about the average ability. But as a team lead, I don't care about average ability. I care only about the worst case. If I have any doubt that someone might not complete a task, or at least accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with at least 95% certainty, I won't assign them the task. If I have any doubt that the code they produce might not be up to snuff, I don't assign them the task. I don't need to review their code; they review each others'. When I have to review code I'm no longer a team lead but a programmer.

I often have one programming project I do myself, on the side, and recently I've been using coding agents. Their average ability is no doubt impressive for what they are. But they also make mistakes that not even a recent CS graduate with no experience would ever make (e.g. I asked the agent for it's guess as to why a test is failing; it suggested it might be due to a race condition with an operation that is started after the failing assertion). As a lead, if someone on the team is capable of making such a mistake even once, then that person can't really code, regardless of their average performance (just as someone who sometimes lands a plane in the wrong airport or even crashes without their being a catastrophich condition outside their control can't really fly regardless of their average performance). "This is more complicated than we though and would take longer than we expected" is something you hear a lot, but "sorry, I got confused" is something you never hear. A report by Anthropic last week said, "Claude will work autonomously to solve whatever problem I give it. So it’s important that the task verifier is nearly perfect, otherwise Claude will solve the wrong problem." Yeah, that's not something a team lead faces. I wish the agent could work like a team of programmers and I would be doing my familiar role of a project lead, but it doesn't.

The models do some things well. I believe that programming is an interesting mix of inductive and deductive thinking (https://pron.github.io/posts/people-dont-write-programs), and the models have the inductive part down. They can certainly understand what a codebase does faster than I can. But their deductive reasoning, especially when it comes to the details, is severely lacking (e.g. I asked the agent to document my code. It very quickly grasped the design and even inferred some important invariants, but when it saw an `assert` in one subroutine it documented it as guarding a certain invariant. The intended invariant was correct, it just wasn't the one the assertion was guarding). So I still (have to) work as a programmer when working with coding assistants, even if in a different way.

I've read about great successes at using coding agents in "serious" software, but what's common to those cases is that the people using the agents (Mitchell Hashimoto, antirez) are experts in the respective codebase. At the other end of the spectrum, people who aren't programmers can get some cool programs done, but I've yet to see anything produced in this way (by a non programmer) that I would call serious software.

I don't know what the future will bring, but at the moment, the craft isn't dead. When AI can really program, i.e. the experience is really like that of a team lead, I don't think that the death of programming would concern us, because once they get to that point, the agents will also likely be able to replace the team lead. And middle management. And the CTO, the CFO, and the CEO, and most of the users.

I'm surprised so many people are only waking up to this now. It should have been obvious as soon as ChatGPT came out that even with only incremental improvements, LLMs would kill programming as we knew it. And the fact that these utterances, however performative, from developers expressing grief or existential despair have become commonplace tells me as much about the power of these systems than whatever demo Anthropic or OpenAI has cooked up.

I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts, still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of software development becomes something akin to googling--just typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at least, we don't pay them very much.

> will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig

guy who doesn't realize we still use hammers. This article was embarrassing to read.

As a very old school programmer who taught myself assembler in 1982 on an 8-bit 4K micro, I don't see much to mourn here.

* People still craft wood furniture from felled trees entirely with hand tools. Some even make money doing it by calling it 'artisanal'. Nothing is stopping anyone from coding in any historical mode they like. Toggle switches, punch cards, paper tape, burning EPROMs, VT100, whatever.

* OP seems to be lamenting he may not be paid as much to expend hours doing "sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM." I've been there. Sometimes I'd feel mild satisfaction on solving a rat-hole problem but more often, it was significant relief. I never much liked that part of coding and began to see it as a failure mode. I found I got bigger bucks - and had more fun - the better I got at avoiding rat-hole problems in the first place.

* My entire journey creating software from ~1983 to ~2020 was about making a thing that solved someone's problem better, cheaper or faster - and, on a good day, we managed all three at once. At various times I ended up doing just about every aspect of it from low-level coding to CEO and back again, sometimes in the same day. Every role in the journey had major challenges. Some were interesting, a few were enjoyable, but most were just "what had to get done" to drag the product I'd dreamt up kicking and screaming into existence.

* From my first teenage hobby project to my first cassette-tape in-a-baggie game to a $200M revenue SaaS for F100, every improvement in coding from getting a floppy disk drive to an assembler with macros to an 80 column display to version control, new languages, libraries, IDEs and LLMs just helped "making the thing exist" be easier, faster and less painful.

* Eventually, to create even harder, bigger and better things I had to add others coding alongside me. Stepping into the player-coach role amplified my ability to bring new things into existence. It wasn't much at first because I had no idea how to manage programmers or projects but I started figuring it out and slowly got better. On a good day, using an LLM to help me "make the thing exist" feels a lot like when I first started being a player-coach. The frustration when it's 'two steps forward, one back' feels like deja vu. Much like current LLMs, my first part-time coding helpers weren't as good as I was and I didn't yet know how to help them do their best work. But it was still a net gain because there were more of them than me.

* The benefits of having more coders helping me really started paying off once I started recruiting coders who were much better programmers than I ever was. Getting there took a little ego adjustment on my part but what a difference! They had more experience, applied different patterns, knew to avoid problems I'd never seen and started coming up with some really good ideas. As LLMs get better and I get better at helping them help me - I hope that's were we're headed. It doesn't feel directionally different than the turbo-boost from my first floppy drive, macro-assembler, IDE or profiler but the impact is already greater with upside potential that's much higher still - and that's exciting.

My ability to ask questions & hone in on good answers is far better than it ever was. My ability to change course & iterate is far faster than it ever has been. I'm making far more informed decisions, far more able to make forays and see how things turn out, with low cost.

I could not be having a better time.

I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow, and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a weekend.

But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I wanted to be doing. I feel incredibly relieved, feel such enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it's way to the rest of the world, possibly.

Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that. But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with incredible raw excitement and possibility before me.

That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people working really hard together to build amazing systems.

> We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor.

Oh come on. 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.

Ephemeralization: the ability thanks to technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." —Buckminster Fuller

If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera

If you want to build a house you still need plans. Would you rather cut boards by hand or have a power saw. Would you rather pound nails, pilot hole with a bit and brace and put in flat head screws... or would you want a nail gun and an impact driver.

And you still need plans.

Can you write a plan for a sturdy house, verify that it meets the plan that your nails went all the way in and in the right places?

You sure can.

Your product person, your directors, your clients might be able to do the same thing, it might look like a house but its a fire hazard, or in the case of most LLM generated code a security one.

The problem is that we moved to scrum and agile, where your requirements are pantomime and postit notes if your lucky, interpretive dance if you arent. Your job is figuring out how to turn that into something... and a big part of what YOU as an engineer do is tell other people "no thats dumb" without hurting their feelings.

IF AI coding is going to be successful then some things need to change: Requirements need to make a come back. GOOD UI needs to make a comeback (your dark pattern around cancelation, is now going to be at odds with an agent). Your hide the content behind a login or a pay wall wont work any more because again, end users have access too... the open web is back and by force. If a person can get in, we have code that can get in now.

There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, more than ever, stop looking back and start looking forward, because once you get past the hate and the hype there is a ton of potential to right some of the ill's of the last 20 years of tech.

This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working at the moment.

The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate.

The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses.

I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.

Dunno, LLMs writing code still feels like they memorized a bunch of open source code and vomited them out in worse condition.

It's not that impressive that Claude wrote a C compiler when GitHub has the code to a bunch of C compilers (some SOTA) just sitting there.

I'm using an LLM to write a compiler in my spare time (for fun) for a "new" language. It feels more like a magical search engine than coding assistant. It's great for bouncing ideas from, for searching the internet without the clutter of SEO optimized sites and ads, it's definitely been useful, just not that useful for code.

Like, I have used some generated code in a very low stakes project (my own Quickshell components) and while it kind of worked, eventually I refactored it myself into 1/3 of the lines it produced and had to squash some bugs.

It's probably good enough for the people who were gluing React components together but it still isn't on the level where I'd put any code it produces into production anywhere I care about.

I'm that 40 year old now. Been writing code since grade 5. Loved it so much I got a PhD, was an academic, then moved into industry.

I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages.

The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done. Seeing my ideas have impact.

What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type the code in anymore.

Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now.

I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think. Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm already delivering things that were on the roadmap for engineering months worth of effort.

I can think about abstractions, architecture, math, organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame compiler thinks about my code.

And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are astronomically more productive than juniors.