Comment by miyoji
1 day ago
> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable.
1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets things wrong. I don't like any of this, it's awful and I would never have gone into this field if someone had told me that it would be like this one day.
2. I cannot condone the means by which these tools were created, which is, as far as I am concerned, theft. I think it's unethical to use them at all, because they were created unethically. I dislike using stolen work, I think it's wrong, and I think everyone who uses it is making the world worse and normalizing theft. If continuing in my career means that I have to compromise my ethics, I wouldn't do it even if I loved this stuff, and see point (1).
3. Is anyone going to pay me more for my "more valuable" skills? Doesn't seem like it, engineering salaries on the whole are going down right now. You can believe they'll go up eventually if you like, but there's no evidence that will happen, or that it's happening. If my employer captures all the value, why should I care whether I'm creating more of it?
> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code.
I'm your exact opposite.
I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more.
So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it.
I've never had so much fun with software. It's starting to feel like magic. And because we possess deep understanding, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.
The AST is not the objective. The finished product is. Our DNA is by all accounts filled with garbage. Let your feelings about code purity and sanctity go. It's the job to be done that matters.
Code is not holy. In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things. Treat it that way today. Means to an end.
"the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.
Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
> In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things
Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the better.
>Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
But using the DNA example- perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. Our bodies are far from perfect but they’re functional and effective. If the biological imperative was perfect genomes and not functional genomes, there would be no life at all.
I’m not a developer, I’m a consumer of digital products. I couldn’t care less, or even have the ability to notice, if code is perfect. I’m here to achieve a goal through software. If it achieves that goal, what is the problem from my end?
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> Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
Perfection in glue and plumbing?
That's what 99% of software is. Even active-active distributed systems are glue and exist only to bridge ephemeral infrastructure. Everything will eventually be thrown out and rewritten.
Nobody lauds the half-century old banking code written in COBOL. They want it ripped out and replaced.
Nothing is "perfect". Not even close.
> "the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.
The code isn't the sand, it's the sandcastle.
> > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things
> Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product?
They'll hear about "You Tube" and "Face Book", I'm sure. But none of the code that runs either of those things will likely be running or capable of running.
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>Or paying attention to tiny little details
That's like, the entire point and the entire reason any of it works with any sense of reliability. Did they not do the "tell me how to make a sandwich" gag to show why thinking about the details matters? Ignoring them is how you end up with borderline unusable applications slower than they were with 10 fewer years of hardware development. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
> So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it.
No offense, but this sounds like you just don't like anything about writing code and you don't have any LLM superpowers, because those are the technical skills that make you good at being a software engineer regardless of whether you're using an agent.
> Code is not holy. In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things. Treat it that way today. Means to an end.
I don't give a shit about code as an artifact. Writing code to solve problems is fun. Prompting an AI to solve problems makes me want to eat a gun. That's a real difference and it's not something I can just change about myself.
> Writing code to solve problems is fun. Prompting an AI to solve problems makes me want to eat a gun.
If this is how well you write prose, I would absolutely hate it if you stopped writing code.
Joke aside, I read your comment and wanted to yell “PREACH!” Pretty sure that’s the first time I felt like I had a use for that word.
I mean, if you don’t like refactoring, which is my absolute favorite, it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture.
Tedium absolutely exists in coding. And is usually a sign of bad interfaces and/or architecture.
For most of us it wasn’t really about getting the user to do X. It’s getting the user to do X at 1/10th of the price, 10x the speed, and the user is left absolutely amazed.
Magic is for the user to experience. Not for the user of the programming language.
> it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture.
I made over $500k TC writing active-active high availability services that moved billions of dollars a day. I've been around the block.
> Magic is for the user to experience. Not for the user of the programming language.
Why are you treating our primitive technology as holy? It's all temporary fucking garbage that is a limitation of our current civilizational abilities.
Do you think the Linux kernel will live forever? I think we'll be done with it before 2050. Seriously.
Everything you think is permanent is just temporary.
I would rather be building star ships and holodecks and engineering 10,000 year human lifespans, brain uploads, and stuff like that than worrying about the craftsmanship of some dumb web service.
I think you should dream more and worry about the current station of SWEs less. We're merely a stepping stone.
You and I are stepping stones. We're dust.
None of what we do today will be relevant in some short decades. And that is a blip on the geologic timescales.
I was born too early for this bullshit. I don't like living with you neanderthals, especially when you don't want to step out of the cave.
Thankfully I don't have to worry about this tech winning. It already is. You can keep up or hold your nose until you're out of a job. There are plenty of other things you could do, I just wouldn't bet on being a truck driver.