> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.

This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!

I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable.

In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.

The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.

There has to be a changing economic undertone to it as well. For a lot of years, the craft that many people enjoyed also happened to pay well and had significant barriers to entry. It's easy to like the craft when it pays you well.

The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself.

* I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.

I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.

What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)

Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.

So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.

But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.

In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.

I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.

Why do so many people miss that it lets software engineers build more bigger better things? It's not just people who think the job is to create value. It's anyone who cares more about creation itself than the process of the creation

I agree that the employee's purpose is to bring value. The question is, now that AI can generate code that's good enough to get by, is there enough value that a software developer brings to justify their continued employment. IMO, the answer for most software developers is no¹, even the ones eagerly embracing AI, so the smugness of AI adopters is likely unwarranted.

The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.

¹ Probably including me.

I'm not seeing the same kind of resentment towards non-technologists as you are claiming. Overall in my life I feel like I haven't seen as much gatekeeping as people claim there is in tech.

I was already pretty clear that the job of producing value was separate from the part of the job that I enjoyed. What makes me sad is the part that I enjoyed evaporating entirely.

"has AI broken that stranglehold?"

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.

30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take.

My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions.

> The people who are upset by this change...

Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.

I wish I gave a shit about producing value for a company.

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.

My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.