[iambateman]

I do not mourn.

For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.

When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.

When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.

Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.

Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.

[eranation]

I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much.

I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".

But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)

My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.

[bayarearefugee]

> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)

Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it will happen much faster than people think.

Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore. When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers, managers in general or even software companies at all anymore.

Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them disappears and then the justified worrying will begin.

People on the "right things to build" track love to point out how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast with the human element removed?

Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't historically some sort of software designer is going to have to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want, but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people just won't really need software as we currently think about it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI.

The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.

[lagrange77]

> The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.

Exactly and the world has to start talking about it. Eventually everybody will, including all sorts of politicians who advocate to 'finally tackle the problem', which will be too late.

[RivieraKid]

> I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".

I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will become even harder than it is today. Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.

[epicureanideal]

> Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.

Always has been. (Meme)

[dynamite-ready]

For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.

Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.

[bayarearefugee]

While what you're saying is true, I think it is important to recognize that painting in a way that generates a livable income is mostly a marketing gig.

Likewise, being a podcaster, or "influencer" in general, is all about charisma and marketing.

So with value destruction for knowledge workers (and perhaps physical workers too once you factor in robotics) we may in fact be moving into a real "attention economy" where all value is related to being a charismatic marketer, which will be good for some people for a while, terrible for the majority, but even for the winners it seems like a limited reprieve. Historically speaking charismatic marketers can only really exist through the patronage of people who mostly aren't themselves charismatic marketers. Without patrons (who have disposable income to share) the charismatic marketers are eventually just as fucked as everyone else.

[jsrcout]

Art, photography, acting, music - none of them are good career choices. You'll either be one of the fortunate few, or you'll struggle to make a living. Sucks but that's how it is.

[rubenflamshep]

> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human

I share this sentiment. It's really cool that these systems can do 80% of the work. But given what this 80% entails, I don't see a moat around that remaining 20%.

[eranation]

I can't explain it in a way that will make sense or base it on any data, but I do see that moat all the time. For example, Microsoft / GitHub somehow taking a 3 year lead (with Co-Pilot) and losing it to Cursor in months, and still catching up.

Microsoft / GitHub have no real limitation to doing better/faster, maybe it's the big company mentality, moving slower, fear of taking risks where you have a lot to lose, or when the personal incentive for a product manager at github is much much lower than the one of a co-founder of a seed stage startup. Co-Pilot was a microscopic line item for Microsoft as a whole, and probably marginal for GitHub too. But for Cursor, this was everything.

This is why we have innovation, if mega-corps didn't promote people to their level of incompetence, if bureaucracy and politics didn't ruin every good thing, if private equity didn't bleed every beloved product to the last penny, we would have no chance for any innovation or entrepreneurship because these company have practically close to unlimited resources.

So my only conclusion from this is - the moat is sometimes just the will to do better, to dare to say, I don't care if someone has a billion dollars to compete with me, I'll still do better.

In other words, don't underestimate the power of big companies to make colossal mistakes and build crappy products. My only worry is, that AI would not make the same mistakes an we'll basically have a handful of companies in the world (the makers of models, owner of tokens e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAi), if AI led product teams will be able to not make the mistakes of modern corporations of ruining everything good that they got in their hands, then maybe software related entrepreneurship will be dead.

[notnullorvoid]

> The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build"

What makes you think AI already isn't at the same level of quality or higher for "build the right things" as it is for "building things right"?

[blargthorwars]

Computers are better at chess. Humans invented chess and enjoy it.

I think humans have the advantage.

[godelski]

  >  "build the right things" [vs] "build things right"

I think this (frequent) comparison is incorrect. There are times when quality doesn't matter and times that it does. Without that context these discussions are meaningless.

If I build my own table no one really gives a shit about the quality besides me and maybe my friends judging me.

But if I sell it, well then people certainly care[0] and they have every right to.

If I build my own deck at my house people do also care and there's a reason I need to get permits for this, because the danger it can cause to others. It's not a crazy thing to get your deck inspected and that's really all there is to it.

So I don't get these conversations because people are just talking past one another. Look, no one gives a fuck if you poorly vibe code your personal website, or at least it is gonna be the same level as building your own table. But if Ikea starts shipping tables with missing legs (even if it is just 1%) then I sure give a fuck and all the customers have a right to be upset.

I really think a major part of this concern with vibe coding is about something bigger. It is about slop in general. In the software industry we've been getting sloppier and sloppier and LLMs significantly amplify that. It really doesn't matter if you can vibe code something with no mistakes, what matters is what the businesses do. Let's be honest, they're rushing and don't care about quality because they have markets cornered and consumers are unable to accurately evaluate products prior to purchase. That's the textbook conditions for a lemon market. I mean the companies outsource tech support so you call and someone picks up who's accent makes you suspicious of their real name being "Steve". After all, it is the fourth "Steve" you've talked to as you get passed around from support person to support person. The same companies who contract out coders from poor countries and where you find random comments in another language. That's the way things have been going. More vaporware. More half baked products.

So yeah, when you have no cake the half baked cake is probably better than nothing. At home it also doesn't matter if you're eating a half baked cake or one that competes with the best bakers in the world. But for everyday people who can't bake their own cakes, what do they do? All they see is a box with a cake in it, one is $1, another for $10, and another other is $100. They look the same but they can't know until they take a bite. You try enough of the $1 cakes and by the time you give up the $10 cakes are all gone. By the time you get so frustrated you'll buy the $100 cake they're gone too.

I don't dislike vibe coding because it is "building things the wrong way" or any of that pretentious notion. I, and I believe most people with a similar opinion, care because "the right things" aren't being built. Most people don't care how things were built, but they sure do care about the result. Really people only start caring about how the sausage is made when they find out that something distasteful is being served and concealed from them. It's why everyone is saying "slop".

So when people make this false dichotomy it just feels like people aren't listing to what's actually being said.

[0] Mind you, it is much easier for an inexperienced person to judge the quality of a table than software. You don't need to be a carpenter to know a table's leg is missing or that it is wobbly but that doesn't always hold true for more sophisticated things like software or even cars. If you haven't guessed already, I'm referencing lemon markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[eranation]

Of course. I mean, my view is that it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things". It's a stab at premature optimisation, focusing on code elegance more than delivering working software. Code simplicity, good design, scalability, are super important for maintainability, even in the age of AI (maybe even more so).

But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default, it's up to us humans to decide what are the "right things to build".

Once AI knows what are the "right things to build" better than humans, this is AGI in my book, and also the end of classical capitalism as we know it. Yes, there will still be room for "human generated" market, like we have today (photography didn't kill painting, but it made it a much less of a main employment option)

In a way, AI is the great equality maker, in the past the strongest men prevailed, then when muscles were not the main means to assert force, it was the intellect, now it's just sheer want. You want to do something, now you can, you have no excuses, you just need to believe it's possible, and do it.

As someone else said, agency is eating the world. For now.

[godelski]

  >  it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things"

I still think this is a bad comparison and I hoped my prior comment would handle this. Frankly, you're always going to end up in the second situation[0] simply because of 2 hard truths. 1) you're not omniscient and 2) even if you were, the environment isn't static.

  > But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default

And this is something I don't believe. I say a lot more here[1] but you can skip my entire comment and just read what Dijkstra has to say himself. I dislike that we often pigeonhole this LLM coding conversation into one about a deterministic vs probabilistic language. Really the reason I'm not in favor of LLMs is because I'm not in favor of natural language programming[2]. The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision[3].

I'm with Dijkstra because, like him, I believe we invented symbolic formalism for a reason. Like him, I believe that abstraction is incredibly useful and powerful, but it is about the right abstraction for the job.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911268

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928421

[2] At the end of the day, that's what they are. Even if they produce code you're still treating it as a transpiler: turning natural language into code.

[3] Okay, technically it does but that's because probability has to do with this[4] and I'm trying to communicate better and most people aren't going to connect the dots (pun intended) between function mapping and probabilities. The lack of precision is inherently representable through the language of probability but most people aren't familiar with terms like "image" and "pre-image" nor "push-forward" and "pull-back". The pedantic nature of this note is precisely illustrative of my point.

[4] https://www.mathsisfun.com/sets/injective-surjective-bijecti...

[wtetzner]

> The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision

Yeah, even if they're made to be 100% deterministic, you've now got a programming language whose rules are deterministic, but hard to understand. You've effectively pinned the meaning of the natural language in some way, but not a way that anyone can effectively learn, and one that doesn't necessarily match their understanding of the actual natural language.

[godelski]

And it's weird that this even needs to be argued given that our long explanations are needed to even convey fairly simple concepts. Not to mention that it still relies upon correct interpretation.

The result of natural language programming is either an extremely limited programming language or an extremely verbose one (again, look at law). Presumably it'll result in both.

It's a nice idea but ignores the reason we invented symbolic languages in the first place. They were invented after natural language. It's not like code is some vestigial language raiment. We're trying to replace it because it's hard and annoying. But I'm certain that's mainly due to the level of abstraction we're trying to work with more than due to the language we're using

[voidhorse]

In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control.

To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.

[bloomca]

I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust for something where they recognize typical patterns.

With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things.

To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.

[mversic]

only the true artist will survive the advent of LLMs

[Fraterkes]

I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting.

Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative.

Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?

[embedding-shape]

> stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative

This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work" it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for others.

[nubg]

What sets you apart from millions of manual programmers?

[dukeyukey]

I've been a professional programmer for 8+ years now. I've stomached that life. I've made things people used and paid for.

If I can do that typing one line at a time, I can do it _way_ faster with AI.

[boxedemp]

You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't have tell tails

[icedchai]

Many AI generated web sites have a “look” and it’s not just all the emojis.

[kelnos]

I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output.

If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature.

That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts.

But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.

[fastasucan]

>It was, for me, never about the code.

Then it wasn't your craft.

[stevejb]

Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things.

There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?

[terminalbraid]

The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill.

You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.

[sally_glance]

I'm pretty sure at least the better woodworking shop managers and QA people all have experience with woodworking and probably would also consider this their craft if asked.

[Xenoamorphous]

If it looks like a cabinet, works as a cabinet and doesn’t fall apart, by all intents and purposes it’s a cabinet. 99% of people out there won’t care if it was a “craftsman” or a robot built it. Just like most people buy furniture at Ikea.

[Revanche1367]

The difference is that the person who was a woodworker is no longer needed. Why can’t the customer just walk up to a kiosk and ask the machine to start building? The machine or another one specialized for QA can then assess if it fits all the technical requirements which the customer doesn’t necessarily understand. This is what most people here are worried about, eventually the professional human being will no longer be needed by businesses which can produce everything with neither customer nor business owner being in need of specialized knowledge which they previously needed to acquire by hiring professionals.

[jstanley]

The only confusion is in the use of the term "woodworking".

For the power tool user, "woodworking with hand tools" isn't their craft.

For the CNC user, "woodworking with manual machines" isn't their craft.

[ori_b]

The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.

There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.

There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.

[datsci_est_2015]

Love this extension of the analogy, particularly. Especially because, like a woodworker inspecting IKEA assembled by a taskrabbit, the craftsmanship of a finished product becomes less and less impressive the longer you inspect it

[AstroBen]

It's feeling much closer to hiring a woodworker to make you something, not woodworking tools

[chongli]

I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.

[gugagore]

Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!

I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.

We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).

But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.

The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...

Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.

Perhaps.

[Ronsenshi]

Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or status not because they like the process. Which is not an issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting exhausting.

[logicprog]

That is an insane assumption to make based on the grandparents' post. What part of them talking about how much they care about the systems thinking and software architecture and usefulness and meaningfulness to other people of software over the day-to-day drudgery of APIs and bugs and typing in syntax indicates to you that they only care about money and status? They just care about a different part of the process.

[shepherdjerred]

I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of college when I got an internship at AWS. I constantly programmed and read programming texts in my spare time growing up, in college, and after work.

I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.

I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.

[twelve40]

> many went into this field for money

I went into this field for both! what do i do now, i'm screwed

[seanmcdirmid]

It is a different kind of code. Just a lot of programmers can’t grock it as such.

I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level. Now I’m doing both with AI and it’s a lot of fun. It is just programming at a higher level.

[iambateman]

I’m going to be thinking about this comment for a while—-and I think you’re basically right.

Almost none of the code I wrote in 2015 is still in use today. Probably some percentage of people can point to code that lasted 20 years or longer, but it can’t be a big percentage. When I think of the work of a craft, I think of doing work which is capable of standing up for a long time. A great builder can make a house that can last for a thousand years and a potter can make a bowl that lasts just as long.

I’ve thought of myself as a craftsman of code for a long time but maybe that was just wrong.

[light_hue_1]

That's just gatekeeping.

It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now.

Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet.

But my craft was not typing. It's coding.

If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.

[kelnos]

A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)

[light_hue_1]

Assembling code doesn't require typing. Linking doesn't require typing.

Even though once upon a time both did.

Claiming that this isn't coding is as absurd as saying that coding is only what you do when you hook up the wires between some vacuum tubes.

The LLM is a very smart compiler. That's all.

Some people want to sit and write assembly. Good for them. But asserting that unless I assemble my own code I'm not a coder is just silly.

[recursivegirth]

Right, there is a non-zero overlap between the VIM Andy's and AI nay-sayers.

[arduanika]

No true programmer is excited for the future.

[heliumtera]

this is so true.

never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars

[bojan]

As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years. I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.

[blibble]

> I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.

have you used them recently?

terrible, is the word I would use

(as a customer since the 2010s)

[boxedemp]

And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge

[arduanika]

Yes, that was the reference!

Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.

[pseudalopex]

Most sarcasm worsens discussion. And the comment guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[senordevnyc]

Haha, I downvoted you from the first category (until I read this comment).

[sumedh]

What is the definition of a true programmer.

Maybe the age of programmers is over and this is the age of builders.

[fullstackchris]

so much garbage ego in statements like this. if you really knew about software, you'd recognize there are about a million ways to be successful in this field

[andyjohnson0]

> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?

Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?

[thedevilslawyer]

For your custom definition of sustainable, perhaps not.

but this is definitely generally sustainable. by 2030 we're fully agentic coding for everything, and it's going to sustain.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

I want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.

[bnchrch]

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things.

This new world makes me more effective at it.

And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

[croes]

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

[Ronsenshi]

I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.

[SoftTalker]

Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.

In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.

[AstroBen]

How much do you think Linus Torvalds has coded over the last decade? Why is he still able to do his job?

[esafak]

His job is reviewing.

[Xenoamorphous]

https://github.com/torvalds

[shimman]

It won't be 5 years, it'll be less than a year. When you don't exercise, your muscles atrophy. It's the same for any other skill. I use to speak conversational french in college, fast forward 10 years later and my understanding is no different than a casual "Emily in Paris" fan.

It'll be the same here, the only question is if those that do exercise will be able to command better salaries. I think this is possible but not with the current political climate.

[Xenoamorphous]

In 5 years coding skills will matter as much as being able to operate an elevator. (sadly)

[dham]

What infrastructure has gone through the last 15 years would like a word.

Half the people I work with can't do imperative jQuery interfaces. So what I guess. I can't code assembly.

[croes]

A programming language is still an additional language with all the benefits of being multilingual.

AI will kill that.

[gamblor956]

If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.

Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.

This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.

[icedchai]

Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.

[stoneforger]

It's been here since it's inception. The more the market grew and the more computing became widespread, the greater the number of ravenous sociopaths with other people's money got involved. This is just another version of Rome burning. This is the terminal acceleration phase. The lunatics are running everything to the ground and the few sane people left are labeled the same way they always had been. The useful idiots are just thinking they're so much smarter. Noone asked if it is wise or not, they are thinking they can outrun the treadmill. Just add water and LLM, it's so much fun for the whole family.

[rdedev]

Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound?

https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk

[ori_b]

> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the process of creating for the immediacy of having. It's paying someone to make for you.

Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.

[wtetzner]

This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so.

I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.

[RivieraKid]

> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.

[RGamma]

AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.

[altmanaltman]

So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process.

It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!"

I mean sure yeah but also not really.

[mikepurvis]

Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like:

- infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y.

- porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17.

- tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python.

- fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible

- fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here?

In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.

[altmanaltman]

But this just makes me feel like it's literally more ABOUT the code than less. The comment I replied to makes it seem like "code" and "solving humanity's problems" are two different things, when in reality, one leads to the other (if we assume you're working on good products, etc.).

It's one thing to have your approach where you're using AI to help w/ the code, but it's totally another to pretend like "code" is not something you were ever interested in, so it's okay for the AI to write it while you're busy "solving problems," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[croes]

But you don’t make.

You order it.

[Ronsenshi]

Because such people are not sincere either to themselves about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make things, not to write code".

Do painters paint because they just like to see the final picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point stand.

Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the process.

[FeteCommuniste]

Right.

It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.

[crazygringo]

No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.

Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.

[tatjam]

Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes

[crazygringo]

Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative and satisfying part. Not the drudgery.

It's not that you've stopped doing anything at all, like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef analogy.

[tatjam]

Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.

I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.

[logicprog]

I think unless you're vibe coding, it's pretty clear that they're still making it. Just because you aren't literally typing 100% of the characters that make up the syntax of the programming language you're using doesn't mean you're not making the final product in most meaningful sentences if you're designing the architecture, the algorithms, the data structures, the state machines, the interfaces, etc, and thinking about how they interact and whether they'll do something that's useful for the people you're making it for.

[derektank]

The transition is from author to editor/publisher. Both play an important role in bringing something new into the world.

[zeroonetwothree]

It's true, but ask an author and 99% of them will say they don't want to be an editor.

[throwawa14223]

But why would someone pay you for that?

[libraryofbabel]

So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster.

To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them.

Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.

[Johnny_Bonk]

I couldn't agree more.