[jstanley]

This is kind of a myopic view of what it means to be a programmer.

If you're just in it to collect a salary, then yeah, maybe you do benefit from delivering the minimum possible productivity that won't get you fired.

But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.

[muldvarp]

> But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.

Maybe currently if you enjoy social engineering an LLM more than writing stuff yourself. Feels a bit like saying "if you like running, you'll love cars!"

In the future when the whole process is automated you won't be needed to make the computer do stuff, so it won't matter whether you would like it. You'll have another job. Likely one that pays less and is harter on your body.

[buu700]

Some people like running, and some people like traveling. Running is a fine hobby, but I'm still glad that planes exist.

Maybe some future version of agentic tooling will decimate software engineering as a career path, but that's just another way of saying that everyone and their grandmother would suddenly have the ability to launch a tech startup. Having gone through fundraising in the past, I'd personally prefer to live in a world where anyone with a good idea could get access to the equivalent of a full dev team without raising a dime.

[jstanley]

You're still focusing on "programming as a job" being fundamental to programming, and I'm saying it's not.

[joks]

But you're not making the computer do things, you're making an idea for a new thing a computer can do and then outsourcing the part of the "making it do things" that is actually fun and fulfilling. I don't get it -- the joy for me comes from learning and problem solving, not coming up with ideas and then communicating those ideas to a tool that can do the rest of the job for me.