Comment by LPisGood
2 days ago
I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money.
Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today.
They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
I don't think that's true at all. I think people who enjoy coding, but don't like AI, like to believe that's true, because it makes it easy to write off AI as useless, and to look down on people who use it ("they're not real programmers anyway. Not like me."). But my experience is that there's a ton of talented people who love programming who also find AI super exciting and useful.
For a hobby I'm writing a little videogame in C using Raylib. I write a lot of the code myself, but sometimes there's an annoying refactor that won't be any fun. I have limited time and motivation for hobby programming, so if an AI can save me 10 minutes of joyless drudgery when I only have 30 mins to work on my project, that's fantastic. Then I get 10 more minutes to work on coding the stuff that's actually interesting.
Not to mention it's an invaluable source of information for how to do certain things. Asking Claude to give me guidance on how to accomplish something, without it writing the code explicitly, is a big part of what I use it for.
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. There are a lot of brilliant developers who love programming and are excited about AI. (Just read Simon Willison's blog, or any number of other people.) Conversely, my sense is that a lot of the people who are just in it for the money don't want AI to change the industry because they don't like learning new things and they feel it threatens the six-figure salaries they get for churning out boilerplate code without having a deep understanding of architecture or systems.
And they may be right to be worried! If you are in the game out of love and you like learning new things about computers you are well-positioned to do well in the AI era. If you just want to get paid forever to do the same thing that you learned to do in your bootcamp in 2018 when the job market was hot, not so much.
Saying those people are only there for the money is a little bit reductive IMHO.
I like computers but I actually don't like programming that much as an action.
Programming is just a tool I use and try to master because it allows me to do what I like and that's building things.
I'm happy that AI is there to help me reduce the friction in building things.
I'd also argue that people who sees programming as an end and not as a mean are also going to either don't like working in most software companies or to be pretty negative contributors despite their mastering because, in my experience, those people tends to solve inexistant problems while having a hard time understanding that what pays their salary are boring CRUDs calling tangled ORM queries.
I said absolutely nothing about money.
> I actually don't like programming
Right, that's my point exactly.
> in my experience, those people tends to solve inexistant problems
Yes, that's definitely a risk with people who really just love writing code. Fortunately, most people who like to write code also like to have useful code written, so in my experience, the folks who will go off an yak shave a thing no one needs for months are fairly rare.
Telling an AI to implement CRUDs calling tangled ORM queries sure sounds like an exciting profession!
..but but... I've never had the opportunity or helpful environment to focus on learning languages and focused on other skillsets.
Other efforts to try and coordinate the time, finances and a team to accomplish the projects that I have in mind also failed miserably..
Am I (for example) so bad to believe that I could possibly accomplish some of my dreams with the help of LLMs as another attempt to be an accomplished human being?
(partly /s but partly not)
I made no moral claims about whether it's bad to want to have code without wanting to go through the experience of writing it.
I want a nice lawn, but I don't want to mow it myself. I pay a landscaper. I don't think that makes me a bad person.
But it does make me a different person from someone who enjoys the process of manicuring a lawn.
The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave.
Ideally. In reality, that's impossible to enforce.
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I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.
Incredibly lucky, honestly. It's a rare thing to have a passion line up with a healthy income.
I went through that in the late 90s and saw the writing on the wall of the 2010s. Hoping it's not too cyclic