[ericmcer]

The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this.

The problem is that sucks, even if all software engineers keep their jobs and salaries, the floor is still pulled out from under us. Imagine if a surgeons job was to supervise robot surgeons from a remote computer, or a woodworker just signs off on work before the machines do all the cutting and assembly. Sure they still have important jobs in their field but the soul & humanity of their skill is gone.

[hax0ron3]

I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast than by shipping great software slowly. I don't have a problem with that in principle. But it does mean that for me, the software development side of things has never had much soul and humanity to begin with. It was just being a glorified assembly line worker, with the sprints being the assembly line. Of course, others may have had very different experiences, but that has been mine.

For me, AIs have actually made the job more soulful, not less. For one thing, it lets me use the part of my mind that is good at human language, not just the part of my mind that is good at software. This makes the job feel a bit less one-dimensional in terms of what parts of me are engaged while doing it. For another, I find it liberating to no longer have to think much about boilerplate code or to spend time roaming around the Internet looking up documentation of various language syntax and API details, the vast majority of which are arbitrary rather than being based on any kind of mathematical beauty. For me it makes the job more soulful that I can think of the job on a higher level instead of having to spend effort on arbitrary and tedious details.

Of course there is still the question of "will the job even exist in a few years, at least for more than a relatively small number of people?". But that's a separate question. For now at least, I am finding that for me AIs have brought a lot more soul and humanity to the job than it ever had before.

[abalashov]

That's an interesting perspective. It's hard for me to relate to it because I haven't worked in a job where I just have to ship code 'for work' in so long. Being a more or less one-man software company, all my work projects, but especially our products, feel like personal projects.

However, if I were just having to do things for the man, I might have a rather different take on all this.

[hax0ron3]

Yup, I can definitely imagine that it's different if you're working directly for customers and have the freedom to do things however you want to do them as long as you still make a living.

[abalashov]

The flip side is that if you have that creative control, then LLMs have _definitely_ sucked the joy out of programming, and in the worst way.

[auggierose]

I don't think that is true. If you have the creative control, and LLMs suck the joy out of programming, then you and I have very different ideas about what that joy was in the first place. I enjoy programming both on a very high and a very low level, and both are more fun with LLMs. On the low-level, you can use that to create the building blocks that the LLM then just has to combine. And on the high-level, you can use that to steer the design in a way the LLM would never be able to, but with the help of the LLM you can connect that high-level design much faster to the low-level building blocks.

[Chu4eeno]

Maybe try using them differently (I tend to use them like static analyzers I can yell at/argue with, and honestly less straining than trying to parse a Coverity report), or just avoid them. Mental health is more important than 20% gain or loss (depending on which study supports your prejudices) in productivity.

[oblio]

You're probably 1 in 10 000 programmers. Most programmers are just regular employees, the vast majority in non tech companies.

[abalashov]

Yeah. It's easy to forget that sometimes.

[odeono]

"Soul and humanity" is doing a lot of work here.

Does the woodworker who shape using a handsaw use less "soul" than the one who uses a machine?

Does the musician who use a DAW and VSTs instead of analogue tape recorders create music with less "soul"?

Does the painter who buys acryllic paint instead of synthesizing their own dye from plants use less "soul"?

As technological innovation progresses, the barrier to creation falls. The process of creating something is not to be conflated with the final piece of art itself.

[runarberg]

Your analogies are flawed. DAWs and skill saws generate nothing. They take skill to operate, and a novice cannot use these tools at all unless they know the craft.

Compare to this to prompting an LLM: “Generate a third person where game with a view from above where you can steal cars, shoot at people, run from the police, etc.” Anybody with access to the tool can do this, and the results are just another uninspiring GTA clone that you would imagine.

The latter is more like a carpenter ordering their “work” from alibaba then it is like using a skill saw.

[customguy]

> Does the musician who use a DAW and VSTs instead of analogue tape recorders create music with less "soul"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqNWNLKpZg

I'm critical of many "AI" developments but I can't and don't want to argue with this. I say we still need to struggle for humanity and we do need to save our souls, but that "it's a machine" is not where the battlefield is.

[hatsix]

Does the carpenter who used to build custom fit cabinets with hand and power tools put in the same creativity when he just carries around a scanner, scans the area, the customers use software to select the layout, approve the work, then the CNC cuts out the wood, then all that's left is to put the screws in the holes and go home.

This isn't like the step from hand saws to power saws, and it's disingenuous to pretend like it is. This is what the startup machine has been doing to every industry... finding... "inefficiencies" and "optimizing" them.

[TurdF3rguson]

Yes, hand made goods come with a story and a memory of the artesan who created them and those things have value.

It's not the item's soul that's at stake when you stop recognizing that, it's your own.

[computerdork]

Hmm, but AI isn't just a really-good tool, it's also doing creative work too. As an aspiring composer, music generators are in my opinion really quite good, and often matches what composers and song writers can do. So if you ask me does a person who creates music with gen AI miss out on the soul of creating music? In my opinion at least, for the most part, yes.

To write a piece of music, you're working at so many different levels, the analytical, emotional, and structural as well as drawing on years of training and experience. When a person with little (or even just a moderate amount of) music training generates a piece of music in a couple hours, are they actually a composer? I personally would say no. I mean it does take a good ear (which is important) to use a music generator well, but still, would say they are more of an editor or an evaluator or a practical critic of music instead of a composer.

Yeah, at what point in a discipline does the increasing skill of AI overtake the need for our contributions from the working being done? In music, it's happened already. Looks like it's happening in coding too.

[jadbox]

Not _my_ opinion, but I just wanted to share that many people (in the Midwest) do believe that anything synthetic that it not readily made from simple materials has "less soul". It's a sorta test of "if I dropped you off in the jungle, can you still produce works of soul? Or are you just another cog in the machine.".

[ImprobableTruth]

Except it's not just a tool.

It's when a woodworker, musician or painter completely outsources their work and just marks what's wrong, sending those parts back. Yes, the final art piece might be the same, but the artist definitely uses less of their "soul".

[afro88]

> The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this.

Do they? I saw some crazy stat from the guy who built claude code that he was pushing hundreds of PRs a day. There's no way you can human review that much code. It's probably closer to heavily AI assisted review and planning.

[davedx]

I don't know if I agree that's the only sane workflow; the problem is, I am way less invested doing code reviews of agents than I am reviewing code by human colleagues.

I would love to be able to say I pay the same amount of attention and am just as diligent and communicate as clearly with an agent, but it wouldn't be honest: I scan agent PRs for obvious mistakes or misinterpretation of what they've implemented.

With human colleagues I usually know them and their style, their way of working, so have a better idea what to look for. You also have a genuine return on providing feedback that helps coworkers learn and improve, whereas with agents, all the feedback you write is gone when the thing gets merged (unless your org has some kind of shared memory for its agents).

I don't have the answer for what the future looks like, but I suspect agent-type-1 reviews agent-type-2 is actually where we'll end up.

[lubujackson]

I think there is a big difference between a surgeon, who is performing a specific task with a clear outcome, to a woodworker, who might produce a unique piece of art or a functional chair. I think the surgeon-type tasks will be replaced eventually. More interesting are the woodworker types, which has some similarities to SWEs.

When industrialization hit, we definitely lost a ton of craftsmanship and craftsman, but a standard Ikea chair is less likely to wobble than the average chair at a much better price (for a random example). Yes, we traded artistry for convenience, but what we really did was bifurcate our needs between "some place stable to sit" from "a beautiful chair for my home". Most people wanted the former more than the latter, and the same applies to software.

If we split the roles into buckets, many woodworkers disappeared, some became artisans, some became designers for industrially-produced products, and some catered to Luddites for a long transitional period. Despite Anthropic's claims, SWEs won't disappear in a year but over a generation or two, no matter how good LLMs become.

Obviously software is much more complicated and integrated into other elements of business, which in a way makes it more vulnerable to AI taking over and in another way will be at the mercy of larger shifts to how businesses organize human roles and responsibilities. What we call "taste" comes down to "intent" - what the hell does a company do? What should it be doing and how should it operate? These will be the only questions that matter and the one thing LLMs can't replace since they will always choose the most default path. So I think human's roles will be to inject intent/taste at different levels of abstraction throughout an organization.

[Melatonic]

Im not sure your assumption holds at all. If anything the ikea chair could argued to be a very efficient use of resources producing a minimally useful chair. But why is it less likely to wobble ?

In addition the incentives are misaligned - the "artisan" made chair (in the past) wasn't likely made for aesthetic reasons - it was made to last long term and function. And if it wobbled or had any problems the original woodworker was probably around to fix it.

[kuschku]

And yet, I ended up throwing the IKEA coffee table out, and instead making one myself.

I had no prior experience with woodworking, and while it's a little bit wobbly, it's much more robust and it's the exact shape and size I need. It cost the same and it'll last much longer.

And there's emotions and a story attached.

[adrianN]

After a couple of years of this their expertise will be gone too and then nobody is qualified to supervise the clankers.

[ozgrakkurt]

Only sane dynamic is human writes code, human reviews code, ai also reviews code.

I don't believe there is any point in having ai generate code

[sumedh]

> but the soul & humanity of their skill is gone.

If robots make life saving surgery cheaper so that many people can afford it, isnt that a good thing?