Comment by vbezhenar
2 days ago
Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI.
Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.
I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. That's why I'm bullish against it. And at the same time I use it, because I feel forced to use it. This is rat race.
At the same time I can say that I don't care about delivering product 10x faster. Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster.
Yes, I understand that contradicts to the business side of view. Well, I don't care. I'm not getting paid percentage of product sales. I'm getting paid flat salary and I care about keeping it and live good life in the process.
I'm being completely honest about it. Maybe it'll help someone to understand that point of view.
I am sympathetic to this point of view. But also: I love reading books. But I'm aware that nobody will pay me to read books.
In much the same way, like you, I love writing code. And there was a time when "writing code" was a close enough approximation to what people wanted to pay me for that I could get paid for doing this thing that I love.
Unfortunately, this is no longer true. This thing that I love is now no longer the thing that people pay me for. It never really was. People paid me for solving problems using software. It's just that the thing I liked to do, the act of writing code, was the only way to accomplish that.
But now it just isn't. Now I can create useful software more quickly and better without actually writing much code. And that does suck, I do experience it as a loss. But I also experience it as a great opportunity.
This is an example of a perspective that is solely lacking: I was a professional programmer for 40 years. I loved writing code in my youth. But then I started to love something more: making bigger things. I’ve grown out of the infatuation with my own self satisfaction with writing code. Now I’m addicted to architectures. There’s a point when you realize coding gets in the way and needs to be delegated. That’s why AI is appealing to me. I can put aside the wrench turning and focus on the bigger construct. It’s a game changer and it accelerates my ideas. I feel like I just got a second wind even though I’m close to retiring thanks to AI.
>Now I’m addicted to architectures
But architecture creation can also be delegated to ai if you give agent enough context about functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc. Your work is to be feedback loop mechanism between people and llm, no? Please, give me encouraging examples of technical tasks that cant be delegated to ai with accurate prompting
I have a feeling that a prompt accurate enough to cover all the important stuff (functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc) would be close in its volume and complexity to the actual software code and configuration (given the proper tools, frameworks and infrastructure in place)...
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I guess I wasn’t very clear. At this point I haven’t found of level of abstraction where AI cannot be helpful. I have set it upon architecture problems but the main obstacle is the domain knowledge that it lacks. My company is working on uploading all of our internal specs as skills, but AI gets confused with poor English and outdated specs. Some groups have succeeded and the high level arch suggestions are being reviewed.
The challenge is guiding the model through decades of human slop: poorly written or missing specifications!
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Thanks for the honesty. I think this is a very useful point of view precisely because it is explicit about being based on personal motivations, and that is completely fair.
That said, as a minor wording point, I'm not sure "I'm bullish against it" is the right framing here. "Bullish" usually implies a positive expectation based on some thesis or evidence. In this case, something like "I'm resistant to it" seems more accurate.
I agree this is a change that affects every software engineer's lifestyle and workstyle. But I think it is important to separate personal motivations from critical, objective analysis when discussing new technologies (e.g. whether for or against AI) so the discussion remains valuable instead of becoming emotionally polarized.
I'm not sure what you're asking for is possible. We're humans, so if something affects us, how we feel becomes relevant to critical, objective analysis. This is a common mistake engineers make: It is not valueless or irrational to discuss practical reality or personal experiences or even emotions.
In other words: You can discuss the implementation details and pricing structures and capabilities of an LLM; and you can discuss the positive/negative effects genAI has on humans. They're both valuable topics. It's impossible to separate them completely.
Longshoremen are anti-cranes. Same thing.
Not the same. Longshoremen become unemployed, I didn't. I just don't this new type of work as a prompt engineer and would never choose it as my career
> Longshoremen become unemployed, I didn't
* yet
Longshoremen didn’t largely become unemployed in 5 years, and the ones that remained were unionized, so their salaries didn’t plummet. Developers have no such protection and we’re about to have way more developers than we need. I’m glad I jumped ship a couple years ago.
Longshoremen in many places were paid advance salaries until retirement and then full pensions.
Programmers will get a pat on the back.
> Programmers will get a pat on the back.
* shoved in the back while facing the door, and told it’s their own fault for getting screwed over.
If you want to know what the future holds for the software dev field, look at copywriters and concept artists. The tech world has been so coddled for so long that many developers think their high salaries, cushy work conditions and clout come from their inherent worth as people rather than persistently high demand for their professional skillset. They’ve got another thing coming.
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Also, code expresses understanding and intent, quite precisely.
Code generators that do not have understanding or intent are limited in their ability to express them precisely.
> Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster
Ideas being expensive was a good thing.
Good ideas are still expensive — there’s just a much lower barrier to pursuing dumb ideas so it’s happens a lot more than it should.
Right there with you. I regularly use Claude for all sorts of tasks, but I am extremely against letting it write loads of code _for_ me. And like you, I find prompting to be a pretty unenjoyable activity, regardless of the task at hand.
AI is _certainly_ not useless and definitely not bad, far from it, but if I could snap my fingers and make it disappear, I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Writing code is my favorite thing to do. Digging into a problem and getting into the flow is my favorite thing ever, and it seems that the world is completely hell-bent on taking this away from me.
I can already hear all the usual responses: "but you can still write code in your spare time," "you were never paid to type anyway," etc etc etc. That's all true, but it doesn't change the fact that writing code in your spare time and being paid to write code for the plurality or even majority of your waking hours are two completely different ways of life. And yeah, there's a lot more to being a software developer than just typing, but the quality of the time spent has completely and utterly changed. It's quickly becoming unrecognizable compare to even just a few short years ago.
I am of the belief that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, and given that so many of our days are now spent doing completely different activities, with a completely different, much "louder" quality to them (I find prompting to be almost _socially_ exhausting, and hate that it more or less completely destroys the ability for oneself to enter a flow state), I think it's completely fair to say that AI has radically changed, or perhaps even ruined, our lives, or at least our livelihoods.
And in my specific case, I already completely changed careers once. Long story short, I was a lifelong musician and well on my way to becoming a successful film/TV/video game composer before I developed hyperacusis. Going through that was horrific. I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a vocation and avocation in programming that, against all odds, I love even _more_ than making music. And once again, I feel that I might just have to change careers. Again.
So yeah. I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to go away. But my life and work were 100% better before it, no question.
Imagine if AI actually delivers utopia and you get to code all you want because your every need is taken care of.
0.01% chance of happening. also i am actively trying to kill my love for coding and move onto 90% agentic at this point since it's doing me more harm than good. i dont think ill get another chance to write code in the future all things considered besides for comp. programming activities
I’d say that 0.01% statistic is pretty optimistic. We’ve got a better chance of a thunderstorm on the moon.
Considering we can't even get corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay even _close_ to their fair share of taxes, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of the idea that a utopia, should it come to pass, will be evenly distributed.
Absolutely naive if you think the capitalists will “deliver utopia”.
I think if the capitalists succeed in aligning it with their values then it will kill them.