Comment by arrowsmith
18 days ago
Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun.
And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back.
I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!
Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you.
I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
Same here i'm a decade plus in this field, writing code was by far the number 1 and the discussion surrounding system design was a far second. Take away the coding i don't think i will make it to retirement being a code/llm PR auditor for work. So i'am already planning on exiting the field in the next decade.
I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever.
To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been all-in on AI for close to a year now, and I have absolutely zero regrets.
I can't believe I used to _type code out by hand_. What a primitive world I grew up in.
I went back to typing myself after a short time, even for the stuff I do rely on LLMs on. I noticed that crucial steps of thinking happen as I type out the code. Letting an agent code, or copying from a chat, versus typing it off manually makes a huge qualitative difference for me. Typing manually is an extreme time saver because of all the issue it lets me catch early on.
At least for me and a lot of others, the mental process is very different between the two. I guess there's a similar dynamic with, e.g., writing a letter to someone vs. dictating it. You prepare differently, think differently. A different text comes out.
Like the author (I forgot which one) who said they once copied an entire classic novel with their typewriter, in order to "see what it feels like to write a great novel." When I first heard it, I thought it was meant as a joke, but there's a lot more truth and sense in that than it might sound like at first.
>You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about.
Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth time?
(a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working on cars, Legos, and so on. (b) it allows you to have some time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the next "hard" section.
I had that same epiphany when I discovered AI is great at writing complicated shell command lines for me. I had a bit of an identity crisis right there because I thought I was an aspiring Unixhead neckbeard but in truth I hated the process. Especially the scavenger hunt of finding stuff in man pages.
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