Comment by amelius
1 day ago
> Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models, wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking. Honestly? I’m having more fun than ever.
I'm sure some people are having fun that way.
But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're dealing with humans. Some people just prefer to sit in a room and think, and they now feel this is taken away from them.
I'm just an old school programmer who loves writing code, and the recent AI developments have just taken the most fun part away from me.
I get this. I don't think either of you is wrong. There's a real loss in not writing something from scratch and feeling it come together under your hands. I'm not dismissing that.
I have immense respect for the senior engineers who came before me. They built the systems and the thinking that everything I do now sits on top of. I learned from people. Not from AI. The engineers who reviewed my terrible pull requests, the ones who sat with me and explained why my approach was wrong. That's irreplaceable. The article is about where I think things are going, not about what everyone should enjoy.
And "taking the fun out" is one thing. Making 50% or more of coders redandunt is a whole other can of worms.
fr, like in 2020 I started to learn programming in C/C++ at 9 and in 2023 when the AI bubble just went on, it feels like I did it all for nothing
Right. What about to K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid)? If I need a bunch of agents and various levels of orchestration to simply close a bunch of Jira tasks then we have a problem. Also, what happens in a few years when this start failing and human operators are no longer able to troubleshoot the issue, forget fixing it.