Comment by ASalazarMX
1 month ago
Then your job has turned into designing solutions, and asking a (sometimes unreliable) LLM to make them for you. If you keep at it, soon you'll accumulate enough cognitive debt to become a fossil, knowing what has to be done, but not quite how it is done.
And really where is your moat? Why pay for a senior when a junior can prompt an LLM all the same? People are acting like its juniors who are going to be out of work like companies are going to just keep paying seniors for their now obsolete skills.
Where do you think your moat is if you insist on sticking at a level of abstraction where the AI keeps eating into your job, instead of stepping up and handling architecture, systems design, etc. at a higher level?
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So no different than management up to the CEO who simply “delegate” to the underlyings?
Exactly. A manager or CEO won't call themselves software engineers. If we change our role similarly in the development cycle, neither should we.
Except most those people have developed the separate skillset of playing work politics to make their job seem necessary.
Do you know how to write the code you write in assembler instead of a higher level language? How many of your peers do?
Most "know what has to be done, but not quite how it is done". This is just another level of abstraction.
I learnt the lesson 30+ years ago that while it was (and still occasionally is) useful to understand the principles of assembly, it had become useless to write assembly outside of a few narrow niches. A decade later I moved from C and C++ to higher level languages again.
Moving up the abstraction levels is learning leverage.
I deliver far more now - with or without AI - than I did when I wrote assembler, or C for that matter. I deliver more again with AI than without.
That's what matters.
> Do you know how to write the code you write in assembler instead of a higher level language?
Actually, I do, but then you could ask me if I can develop in machine language, and I'll hate to reply no. The abstraction is not the point, but the isolation from the core task. If you're a brilliant fashion designer, you even know how to sew, but outsource your work to an Asian sweatshop, you can never be sure it's well done until you see the result.
Using an abstraction is not the same as using a black box.
> I deliver far more now - with or without AI - than I did when I wrote assembler, or C for that matter. I deliver more again with AI than without.
> That's what matters.
Also, in some disciplines, quality sometimes matters more than quantity.