Comment by raw_anon_1111
1 day ago
Context: I’m 51 years old, started programming in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e, wrote C and C++ on every platform imaginable from mainframes to Windows CE devices between 1996 to 2012 and part of my job has always been to write production level code.
> I am deeply sad that we may be losing the craftsmanship side of programming;
Absolutely no company is paying you for your “craftsmanship”. You are getting paid to add business value either by making the company more or saving the company more than your fully allocated cost of employment.
> Until now, every abstraction was engineered and deterministic. You could reason about it and trace it. LLMs, on the other hand, are non-deterministic. Therefore, we cannot treat their outputs as just another layer of abstraction.
The output of the LLM is deterministic code. No one is using an LLM in production to test whether a number is even.
You can run unit and integration tests on the resulting code just like your handcrafted bespoke code. When I delegated tasks to more junior developers, they weren’t deterministic either.
> For example, I genuinely want to invest time in learning Rust
I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting. I know CloudFormation like the back of my hand. I’ve been putting off learning Terraform and the Amazon CDK for years. Last year, I had a project that needed the CDK and then another project that required Terraform. I used ChatGPT for both and verified they created the infrastructure I wanted. Guess what I’m not going to waste time doing now? The client was happy, my company got paid, what’s the point?
> As a developer, I am confused and overwhelmed, and I want to hear what other developers think.
If you are an enterprise developer (like most developers are) your job has been turning into a commodity for a decade because their were plenty of good enough backend/full stack/web/mobile developers and it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. AI has just accelerated that trend.
This is no way meant meant to put myself as more than an enterprise developer who happens to know how to talk to people and “add on to what Becky said” and “look at things from the 1000 foot view”.
By definition, today, AI is the worse that it ever will be.
AI works really well for generating "infrastructure" code like Terraform. Most of it is cookie cutter, and if it isn't, there's a good chance you're probably doing something wrong anyway.
There's no "craftmanship" there. And I don't want there to be.
It works well for Python too and JavaScript and on a whim I had it create AppleSoft Basic code. Trust me there is no “craftsmanship” in a LOB CRUD app or yet another SaaS app. Your CRUD enterprise code is just as cookie cutter. You’re not doing anything groundbreaking.
Absolutely no one gives a damn about “craftsmanship”. I just got rave reviews from a customer for my completely AI generated website for their internal use. I didn’t look at a single line of code and haven’t done any serious web development since 2002 in classic ASP.
The customer is happy. My company is happy and they continue putting money in my bank account on the 1st and 15th. I use to think like you. But I quickly grew out of it.
Heh. I think we agree. You may be referring to the OP.