alt Hacker NewsQuoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good.
> opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option.
I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my current state.
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> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.
> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"
> I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs.
I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did.
Nowadays I see people doing far more in a month than I could in a year and I feel like its all a waste, like I just spent the past few years transcribing a phonebook while standing next to a photocopier.
I don't know if that'll ever change. I can't even pretend I was doing something prestigious and artisan like watchmaking because I wasn't a good programmer beforehand.
I and my friends go back and forth, every day, on whether coding with LLMs is a net plus or a net negative.
I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer.
I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This is in some ways the worst of both worlds, but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia while still getting pretty good code out, so I consider it superior to how I worked before. I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.