Comment by richard_todd
18 days ago
The craft is still there just like painting is still an alternative to a photograph. It's just not going to be valued by society anymore, and far fewer will learn how to do it. Natural language is the new programming language. For now, understanding the craft is still an edge in making better prompts, but already I can see that telling Antigravity "now look for ways to make this more efficient" works almost as well as guiding it specifically on how it had duplicated some code flows.
I do feel a kind of personal loss in the sense that society is in the process of stopping to value or admire the design and coding skill I've cultivated since I was 6yo. At the same time, I'm kind of thrilled that I can write a detailed readme.md and tell an agent to "make it so" and I can iterate to a utility program in 20 minutes instead of an hour. When I feel a pit in my stomach is when that utility program uses some framework that I haven't learned, and don't need to because their code worked perfectly the first time. Surely that means I'm going to basically stop learning the details, as the details I've accumulated over my life quickly begin to not matter anymore.
Honestly I'm planning to use AI to make a kick-ass retro development environment a la "Sending Modern Languages Back to 1980s Game Programmers" (https://prog21.dadgum.com/6.html) and spend my retirement having fun in it.
Natural language is not a programming language. Programming is precision. Natural language is fuzzy.
>> spend my retirement having fun in it.
People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.
Even if I were retired and financially set now, that would mean nothing in 10 years if an unemployed society collapses around me. Apathy is not on the menu today.
>People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.
Not everyone has to become a programmer, people at the start of their careers can chooses paths other than programming if they're afraid of the (lack of) future prospects from AI. Where did people work before the ZIRP boom? Those industries are still around. Plenty of STEM related jobs besides programing.
Did society actually value those skills before? Maybe companies or individuals did, but giving coded instructions to computers was seen by most as wizardry at best and geeky at worst. Unfortunately, I feel society values tackling and home run hitting, superficial beauty, and wealth, far more than technical skills.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one that thinks about retirement and having fun writing "my own" everything, just for the sake of it. From the compiler all the way to the UI library.