Comment by linsomniac

This is a funny opinion, because tools like Claude Code and Aider let the programmer spend more of their time thinking. The more time I spend diddling the keyboard, the less time I have available to be thinking about the high-level concerns.

If I can just thinking "Implement a web-delivered app that runs in the browser and uses local storage to store state, and then presents a form for this questionnaire, another page that lists results, and another page that graphs the results of the responses over time", and that's ALL I have to think about, I now have time to think about all sorts of other problems.

That's literally all I had to do recently. I have chronic sinusitis, and wanted to start tracking a number of metrics from day to day, using the nicely named "SNOT-22" (Sino-Nasal Outcome Test, I'm not kidding here). In literally 5 minutes I had a tool I could use to track my symptoms from day to day. https://snot-22.linsomniac.com/

I asked a few follow-ups ("make it prettier", "let me delete entries in the history", "remember the graph settings"). I'm not a front-end guy at all, but I've been programming for 40 years.

I love the craft of programming, but I also love having an idea take shape. I'm 5-7 years from retirement (knock on wood), and I'm going to spend as much time thinking, and as little time typing in code, as possible.

I think that's the difference between "software engineer" and "programmer". ;-)