[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.

[crazygringo]

> 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 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace.

For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed.

The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!

[tatjam]

I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).

[icedchai]

I see junior PM types glowing about being able to lead teams of agents, doing their bidding without putting up a fuss or argument. Short term, developers are in for a world of hurt. Long term, we're going to need a lot more to clean this crap up.

[icedchai]

I think there is room for a hybrid approach. You can delegate most of the "drudgery" to AI, but keep the parts that require creative solutions for yourself. There is undoubtedly a lot of crappy work we have to do as engineers. This is stuff that needs to be done but has also been done many times before.