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by coldpie 380 days ago
> In my experience so far, the people that aren’t getting value out of LLM code assistants, fundamentally like the process of writing code and using the tooling

> All of my senior, staff, principals love it because we can make something faster than having to deal with a junior because it’s trivial to write the spec/requirement for Claude etc…

Hm, interesting. As someone who has found zero joy and value in using LLMs, this rings true to me. Setting aside the numerous glaring errors I get every time I try to use one, even if the tools were perfect, I don't think I would enjoy using them. I enjoy programming, thinking about how to break down a problem and form abstractions and fit those into the tools the language I'm writing in gives me. I enjoy learning and using the suite of Unix tools like grep and sed and vim to think about how to efficiently write and transform code. The end product isn't the fun part, the fun part is making the end product. If software engineering just becomes explaining stuff in English to a machine and having some software pop out... then I think the industry just isn't for me anymore. I don't want to hand the fun part over to a machine.

It's like how I enjoy going to my wood shop to build tables instead of going to Ikea. It would be cheaper and faster and honestly maybe even better quality to go to Ikea, but the joy is in the knowledge and skill it takes to build the table from rough lumber.

2 comments

"As someone who has found zero joy and value in using LLMs"

I love programming but find zero joy in front-end coding. For me LLM's solved that bit nicely. I'm sure a real webdev would do better, but I can't afford it for my personal projects and the LLM helped me to get it done more than good=enoug for my needs.

Software at scale is a business function

You’re describing a hobby/artistry process

You can still do all that, the same way that you can still build a table at your house.

But the number of number of handmade table builders is going to drop to effectively zero for the majority of table building going forward

I'm not sure I agree that will happen, but if it does, then yeah like I said, it's probably my cue to exit the industry. If the fun goes out of the job, there's other things I'd rather do than sit inside alone and stare at a screen all day.