alt Hacker NewsIt depends if you were a dev who liked more the micro parts or a dev who liked more the macro parts. To compare, think about going to an artisan or a musician or a painter (or any creative like most programmer who started by being passionate about it) and telling him "well now you can ignore the fine details, there is a tool which does that for you and you just focus on the less mundane tasks."
I for sure know I would get a slap in the face
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It's more like not having to clean up the paint and organize supplies before and after. The robot does a good enough job most of the time.
This. This is the real phenomenon of the AI-assisted development decade.
People who became programmers because they are naturally motivated by the craft, are now "unproductive" unless they dispense with their beloved crafting activities forever. What are they going to do? Voluntary buyouts for starters.
But then who will be left? What kind of software will they provide?
Agreed, really enjoy solving tough problems. Like having some interesting enhancement that needs to be carefully and surgical added into a complex codebase. Or writing an algorithm that grabs a bunch of info, sorts it in multiple ways, and uses this info to generate a useful result for our API (am thinking of specific past situations that have done this).
What is not fun is the repetitive stuff, where you have to search a code base for the same change over and over again, but it's not something you can just do a search and replace. Am happy to have AI do this (although, even this, you still have to read through every change).
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Apples and oranges. Hot take: fine details in an artwork are extremely important. "Fine details" in a codebase are either some pattern you can easily instruct an agent to follow, or deliver zero value.
I want to agree with you, and my instinct certainly is to do so. one thing is for me is, I don't see code as art, to me it is math / science, and we are scientists, using the scientific method to solve problems with questions, hypothesis, evidence, and conclusions, all in the form of documentation and code.
I love writing code, it is quite thrilling going through meticulously and spotting that thing no one else could. Writing code, however, is daunting, taxing on the mind, takes a lot of mental toll, and you must be in the proper mental space. So if i have a tool, that can take some of that weight off of my mind, so i can focus on the bigger picture, is a good thing.
The end goal is still software that people use. I think we should focus more on our new found extent of our powers. I feel at least 6x my normal velocity. How many new projects have you been able to tackle since the advent of AI? I know for me it has been numerous for sure. We're living in the future man. I write code on the train, and in my sleep nowadays. Crazy times.