I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated.
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
The lake is not however yours to dictate how others will move along. Imagine if the horse owners decided in such an analogy not to allow cars on the road because they noisy and "totally different experience".
You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
nah. tell him, you're in a race. others are using motorboats. the last to reach the finish line loses their salary.
that's a better analogy, or at least what a lot of people think the analogy is.
My hypothesis around this and other peoples sentiments who dislike AI while citing similar reasons as the post is not simply that they enjoyed arriving at the destination.
Rather the issue is they believe they are GOOD at the "journey" and getting to the destination and could compare their journey to others. Another take is they could more readily share their journey or help their peers. Some really like that part.
Now who you are comparing to is not other people going through the same journey, so there is less comradery. Others no longer enjoy that same journey so it feels more "lonely" in a way.
Theres nothing stopping someone from still writing their own code for fun by hand, but the element of sharing the journey with others is diminishing.
He's not getting customers by rowing them across the river when the motorboats do it faster and cheaper. You compared a hobby to doing something "for a living".
I turned 59 this week. I am excited to go to work again. I use Claude every day. I check Claude. I learn new things from Claude.
I no longer need a "UI person" to get something demonstrable quickly. (I've never been a "UI guy"). I've also never been a guy coding during every waking moment of my life as that would have been disastrous for my mental health.
I am retiring in <=2 years, so I am having fun with this new associate of mine.
One pitfall I've managed to avoid all these 36 years I've been at it is not falling in love with the solution. I fall in love with the problems. Claude solves those problems far quicker than I ever could.
I turn 52 in a couple of months and I’ve only lasted this long from starting out as a hobbyist in 1986 by not being the old guy yelling at the clouds.
I got into “cloud” at 44, got my first job (and hopefully last) at BigTech at 46 and now I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev leading projects at 51.
Every project I’ve done since late 2023 has involved integrating with LLMs and I usually have three terminal sessions up - one with Claude, one with Codex and one where I do command line stuff and testing.
I am motivated by the result, the design and on the system level.
I suppose in a way it's like saying diesel engines killed passions for sailing.
A career sailor on a sailing ship who finds meaning in rigging a ship just so with a team of shipmates in order to undertake a useful journey may find his love of sailing diminished somewhat when his life's skills and passions are abruptly reduced to a historical curiosity.
Other sailors may prefer their new "easier" jobs now they don't have to climb rigging all day or caulk decking (but now they have other problems, you need far fewer of them per tonne of cargo).
And the diesel engine mechanics are presumably cock-a-hoop at their new market.
(This analogy makes no claim as to the relative utility of AI compared to diesel ships over sailing vessels).
I agree, I’m an old dude too. For personal projects I do what I like. I also like carving stone and wood the hard way, just because.
At work though the hype sucks the life out of the last part of the job that some people found enjoyable, because complete control is enjoyable. Personally I think work is just doing what someone else wants, rather than pleasing yourself.
because my company is mandating that we use motorboats instead of rowboats.
i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.
>It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
This is a real thing that happens and the analogy is clearly working against you! If you paddle a canoe or rowboat on a river or lake, your experience is made MARKEDLY worse by a motorboat zooming by and scaring the fish, rocking you with wake, smelling up the place with 2-stroke fumes, etc. Even when the motorboats aren't there, the built environment that supports them is bigger and more intrusive.
Well, I do.
I do not dislike AI at all: I even find it fun, although different.
The thing is that I am not only enjoying the journey, although it is was I enjoy the most by far. But when everyone is able to reach the destination, the interest in the journey decreases (if this makes sense).
It is not a rant against AI: I use AI daily, it IS useful, it is just less fun since AI is around, and the only way I can explain this is the journey vs the destination.
It's just change. Yeah I also miss coding, but I also like the new things that AI allows me to access. And in times of change we can feel uncomfortable, because what we were used to is no more, and we cannot see yet what is to come. But if you're open to it, a new passion will arise in you, that you could never imagined before.
I was like this a few months back. You want to code and solve problems, but the AI can do all that for you. I got over it by moving the problem solving further down the chain. Treat the AI the team you are directing to solve the issue.
If I wanted to become a project manager I would have become one. AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
> If I wanted to become a project manager I would have become one.
It's not so much a project manager. I have something I want to build, I create the plan and work slowly through it with Claude. Stopping at every piece and reviewing as I go.
I can confirm the code is good, but also when it takes a different approach I question why it took that approach. Occasionally I learn something.
> who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
Sometimes you want the app but don't care how it gets created, because its helping you focus on what you really want to do. For example I created a mindmap App in XCode on-par with XMind. Not every feature, but everything I use.
>AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are engineering solutions to real human problems and who just want to tinker with code.
Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
Haha! Your analogy doesn't work on multiple levels. Firstly, if you're outsourcing your work to AI you're not the engineer anymore. A civil engineer is different from a manager of a civil engineering project. Just like I wouldn't call myself an artist if I got AI to generate me some art, I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me.
Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results. Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck, because you don't have the necessary oversight in the quality of the output unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving.
False. If you "outsource your code" to a compiler and just write higher level language, you're not an engineer. You literally don't own any of your own code, just an abstraction of it written in human language. See how that works? An engineer can delegate -- period.
- "I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me"
If all you do is write code you're not an engineer. I think you fundamentally don't know what engineering is. In a very real sense engineering is what you do when you're not coding. The civil engineer doesn't construct the bridge personally.
- "Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results".
Codemonkeys DON'T CARE about the quality of the end result. They only care about their little corner of the zen garden. Writing real software for real users is by far the worst part of a codemonkeys job.
- "Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck"
Nonsense. The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details. Forest for the trees.
- "unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving."
Who said anything about "saving time"? We're engineering high quality systems. Some of us spend our time at a higher level, thinking holistically about the system, testing multiple concepts and rapidly iterating. Others demand bespoke handwritten code and in the time allowed can barely finish a single concept with a questionable amount of polish. Whatever their first idea is will ship, and they'll have no real ability to justify the architecture other than vibes.
Yes and no. Engineering does involve delegation but what defines an engineer is is what work they do, not what work they pass onto others.
If it helps you understand this, consider the role of an engineer as someone that makes engineering decisions. If you give a specification to a colleague and ask them to write code for you, then you're delegating those engineering decisions. When you write high level code, yes you allow a compiler or interpreter to determine how to turn your instructions into machine code, but you have made engineering decisions in order to design the end result. If you give instructions via product specifications, then you have acted as a project manager or business analyst, not as an engineer.
To use another analogy, imagine you are a chef and you go to eat at a restaurant you don't work in. When you order from the menu, you are not a chef at that moment, even if your background suggests you are capable of being one. Similarly, ordering code from an AI agent does not give you the right to call yourself an engineer when doing so, as you did very little of the real engineering work to produce the end result.
> If all you do is write code you're not an engineer.
Engineering requires thought and application of thought, and if you're outsourcing both then you don't qualify as an engineer.
> The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details.
The devil is in the details. A technical architect that doesn't understand the tradeoffs in the designs they're specifying isn't worth the money they earn.
> Who said anything about "saving time"?
Almost everyone that is selling the benefits of AI. Clearly you haven't been paying attention to industry trends.
> Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
> Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
Not a great comparison. I'd agree with you if it was straight up vibe coding.
But co-creating (which is what I do) I create plan, then step through it with Claude. Claude creates a small part of what I want, I review, tweak or ask Claude why it took that approach if its different.
I know the subject matter of what it is creating, so in this sense it is safe, as long as I am reviewing everything.
It gets dangerous if you just let it create something without any interaction or understanding of what is being created.
>Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
Of course. I've seen how sloppy and lazy humans are, and I already use the bridge, and if the safety truly came down to the output of single person, then the risk is already significant.
I must say, I got a chuckle at "using AI to do their calculations". Oh no, my agent is going to write a python script to do basic maths, and check their work against a series of automated tests, the sky is falling!
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.