alt Hacker News> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).
I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.
Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.
What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.
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Well, I can't speak for the person above, but in my case typing out the code is part of solving the problem. Plenty of times I've thought I had a great idea in my head, and then in the process of writing it out found better understanding and an even better approach. Some of that can still be emulated with LLMs -- you can read the output and have it tweak things where you find oddities, but its still not really the same, and I miss having that process of discovery and improvement.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never really clicked with a "plan everything upfront, and then all that's left is writing the code" process
I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming
So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"
So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.
Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being
I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless
And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.
If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.