Some people never really liked writing code. They liked the result and the paycheck much more. Those folks are having the time of their lives now. Well, until the fall happens and software development is assmebly-lined.

It’s because there always were two types of engineers and the difference was never clear until this technology existed. Some love the craft, and some love the results.

It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

"software engineer" covers a wide range of responsibilities. some engineers spend all their time contributing to the physics in a massive graphics engine. some spend most of their time as the sole maintainer of a web api that mostly plumbs together a bunch of services and provide data to UIs. some are frequently spitting out new services while other are maintaining 10 year old legacy codebases. the work we need to do, the tradeoffs we need to make, its just so vast.

now couple that with the wide range of variety (and dysfunction) that come from the business and organization. being a dev for a company which sells software is a whole different beast than being an in-house dev for a company which sells other products. startup, big org, old org, new org, strike team, the list goes on.

finally, engineers enjoy different aspects of building software more than others. the puzzle, the crafting, the api, the data structure, the architecture, solving end user needs, so many facets to what makes it enjoyable as a career.

this is a big reason why ai discourse online is so uneven and often unhelpful. were all assuming too much about what being a software engineer is; forgetting that my day-to-day can be wildly different than yours.

a lot of ai speedup comes from effective delegation of work. i do it, but i don't like it. it actively makes me feel tired in a way i don't feel when i do the work myself, or when i mentor and grow my team to do the work.

many other devs don't feel the way i do. some suddenly have these ai tools that make them feel more empowered and energized and excited.

llm's are genuinely a new computing paradigm because of their nature: plain human language as the interface. this is different enough that mapping our past computing concepts (like the evolution from assembly to C) may not hold as well as seem they should.

this all digs deep into who we are as individuals with specific desires, career history, goals, a specific role at a specific company. the part that's fucking beautiful and unique and human.

But if the aggressive industry-wide layoffs aren't enough of a clue, these giant ass companies (and the ai gatekeepers driving this shift) are not compatible with individual humans.

i dont mind llms as a tool, but im done with the perverse level of greed and inhumanity they seem to inspire in corporate leaders.

  > Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

1. its forced on me at $job; its just a tool so let me use it when i need it and stop making my work-life miserable with childish tokenmaxing leaderboards

2. co-workers who send low-effort low-quality pr's that introduce tons of complexity and waste everyone's time and that they cant answer basic questions about because they no longer know how it works

3. the absolute cult-like manic behavior with some people around "ai"... yes its fun and interesting and cool tech so please stop treating it like a religion ffs

just my 3c

It's not hard to observe what the tools and systems can do. It's impressive. But I suspect for some the trade-off is not worth it based on their principles. No amount of disbelief or encouragement will change that.

It’s the NES Game Genie.

Unlimited lives and the ability to walk through walls is great fun for a bit. But also, you never actually played the game and it kinda ruined it for you, for all time.

You’ve seen the outcome, you solved nothing, learned nothing, and there’s zero reason for you to ever be proud of it.

The outcome isn’t yours, it’s the chatbots. Maybe you lie to yourself a bit… but you were barely necessary.