Comment by arjie
3 days ago
I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.
This 1000x!
I had a bit of an identity crisis with AI first landed and started producing good code. “If I’m not the man who can type quickly, accurately, and build working programs… WHO AM I?”
But as you pointed out, I quickly realized I was never that guy. I was the guy who made problems go away, usually with code.
Now I can make so many problems go away, it feels like cheating. As it turns out, writing code isn’t super useful. It’s the application of the code, the judgement of which problems to solve and how to solve them, that truly mattered.
And that sparks a LOT of joy.
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I imagine this same argument happening when people stopped using machine code and assembly en masse and started using FORTRAN or COBOL. You don't really know what you're doing unless you're spending the effort I spent!
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You definitely completely misconstrued what was said and meant.
It appears you have yet to grapple with the question asked. And I suspect you would be helped by doing so. Let me restate the question for you:
If actually writing code can be done without you or any coworker now, by AI, what is your purpose?
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Anyone who can’t read Proust and write a compelling essay about the themes is illiterate!
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It’s possible to be someone who’s very good at writing quality programs but still enjoy delegating as much of that as possible to AI to focus on other things.
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Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried!
Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that.
Fair enough. But that particular could be anything that has been bothering you but you didn’t have the time or expertise to fix yourself.
I wanted that fixed, and I had given up on ever seeing it fixed. Suddenly, in only two hours, I had it fixed. And I learned a lot in the process, too!
> Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that.
To each their own! I think the market for folks who understand their own problems is exploding! It’s free money.
Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it.
Maybe you can tell us the name of the software so we can avoid it?
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft....they literally all have the vibe coded code; it's not about vibe coded or not, it is about how well the code is designed, efficient and bug free. Ofc pro coders can debug it and fix it better than some amateur coder but still LLMs are so valuable. I let Gemini vibe code little web projects for me and it serves me well. Although you have to explain everything step by step to it and sometimes when it fixes one bug, it accidently introduces another. But we fix bugs together and learn together. And btw when Gemini fixes bugs, it puts comments in the code on how the particular bug was fixed.
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It's a personal project. No need to be a dick.
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This. Busy-beavering is why the desktop Linux is where it is - rewriting stuff, making it "elegant" while breaking backwards compatibility - instead of focusing on the outcome.
macOS breaks backwards compatibility all the time, and yet...
Other than security-related changes, as a user, I find macOS to be quite generous about its evolution, supporting deprecated APIs for many years, etc.
SIP and the transition to a read-only system volume are the only two things that I remember broke things that I noticed.
It’s not Windows-level of backwards compatibility, but it’s quite good overall from the user side.