Comment by simonw
7 days ago
Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources.
Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.
> Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build?
You should build what’s personally fun and challenging to you and/or what is useful and solves a problem. Building for any other reason, including and especially the unfettered pursuit of profit, is what turns everything to shit.
Well, there goes all our jobs.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, big boy gotta eat, and that means we have to sit around writing shitty commercial software. I already hate that, I would prefer if it didn't get worse.
Absolutely!
I've noticed that almost immediately after people discovered GPT could write code, this happened -- startups I worked with started rapidly expanding the scope of what they wanted to make. Suddenly all MVP's had to be multi-tenant with complex authorization, impersonation, microservices, monitoring, all the stuff that we used to build after we got users has now been pulled right to the starting gate of development -- because AI makes it easy to build all that stuff quickly. But it doesn't tell us if we should.
Exactly, I think one of the reasons programers are becoming so depressed over these AI agents is that they’re finally realizing that it was never really about the code, but about the outcome - and btw, this cold hard fact applies to the pre-LLM era.
This occurred to me years ago when I was talking to a friend’s wife, who is a very intelligent and accomplished attorney. She was legitimately surprised when I explained that they were multiple programming languages, and technology stacks behind the software that she uses on a daily basis.
Even my wife, a teacher who is very tech savvy (she’s the one who insisted I try ChatGPT after brushing it off) reminds me on the regular that she doesn’t care about how any of it works just that it doesn’t “glitch” when she’s in the middle of a class. Which has always been good for me to remember when I get off into the weeds yak shaving.
I do think code-as-craft should be respected in its own right. I'm very much a craftsman coder. It makes sense how I could clock so many hours over all these years.
But what I do "at work" isn't the same as my personal pursuit and embracing that different framing positively has made me more at peace and also better at the work job.
"AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management", said Andrew Ng.