Comment by munksbeer

> It bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development? Just about solving problems.

Why?

Intellectual curiosity is a good thing. When I first went to university, I thought I was going to be a physicist. It turns out my brain was really well wired for programming, being logical, rigorous, particular about detail, I like predictability, not a high risk taker without fully understanding and accepting the risks, etc.

But when I first started off as a programmer, I wrote physics simulations for fun (not work). I'd write little games, I wrote neural nets and fuzzy logic (gives me a chuckle), back in the 90s when the field was new. All of this was "my thing", and I barely cared about the code I wrote to achieve this. I absolutely loved it, because coding was a tool to explore my intellectual curiousity.

I could say the exact opposite, that I feel a bit sad that people care more about the characters they type on a screen than the concepts they explore.

As I morphed into a professional software engineer, I grew to understand the importance of high quality code and engineering (I mean architecture decisions). I have had a long, successful career by refining my craft. I care about the quality I produce for my future self and others, and the success of the product as a result of this quality.

But at the heart, I am still just an intellectually curious person, and one day I may stop working professionally and at that point, I think I'll love using AI to write code and help me explore concepts. I very much look forward to it in fact.