Comment by dofm
1 day ago
Right, but I am a middle-aged bloke who is experiencing existential angst about whether I can carry on in this industry.
I have a pretty deep, maybe paranoid need to be confident I have an intrinsic understanding, and I have found in my life that lessons come to you when you make yourself open to learning.
So I need to build on top of what I know, taking as much of the hard way as I can bear to take at any one time — it has to be not quite difficult enough to put me off.
I can't really explain what I have learned this way that is different, but I feel it in a way that I wouldn't if I'd simply pushed a button.
For the same reason, I have a really basic 3D printer that I've set up myself, set up Klipper, configured how I want it, learned how to calibrate, all that. And now I can say that I feel I have an understanding of 3D printing. I could hold my head above water in a discussion with a real expert, maybe find work in an adjacent field where my insights would keep me grounded.
I can afford a really good printer that has all that set up, and more, has no problems. But I'd just be someone who has a 3D printer.
(Also who am I kidding about the existence of a printer with no problems)
This really resonates with me, and I'm only a decade and change into my career. I use claude a lot day to day. I try to use it sensibly, making me more productive and produce better work. I'm also trying not to lose understanding along the way. I want to be able to actually talk to the conclusions I'm reaching.
I have colleagues that seem perfectly content to delegate too much to the agents, and it saddens me. It feels like there will be swaths of engineers that didn't train some of the critical thinking skills that I take for granted.
I certainly see it in slack discourse around anything more complicated than a feature implementation. Maybe I'm just cynical. Time will tell, I suppose.
You will not live enough to learn everything. Eventually you have to say "I could figure [something] out but I won't take that time." Most things are that way - I probably could learn brain surgery (I used this example because it has a reputation of being a very difficult course of study). I would like to make a lathe from scratch - but I don't have easy access to enough iron ore to get started - even if I start from scrap metal, I probably wouldn't spend months making my own surface plate (...) and so I own a factory made lathe instead.
That is why I'm content to delegate to agents - I have more code/features I want to write than I have time to debug (writing is the easy part).
For me (about halfway between you and dofm in my career by your own statements in this thread), it's a dream at the moment. I can delegate all the tedious stuff that I've done "the hard way" a thousand times already and feel I have very little of value remaining to learn, so that I can spend more time on all the things that are actually new and thus much more interesting.
It's been a great multiplier for me in similar ways. The "dreamiest" thing has been that it has freed up time that I would normally have spent doing sprint work, to work on things that just don't make the cut until it's bad enough to deprioritize other work.
Over the last few months, I've been digging into performance problems with a high throughput service that my team owns. I started working on the problems in my own time, put out short and medium term improvements that legitimately avoided operational issues, and started developing an alternate architecture that should meaningfully address the problems for the long term.
I've learned new things and made improvements that probably wouldn't have ever gone in otherwise.
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Yeah, this is just the engineer's mindset. It's not surprising that this is a popular view here, even if it is not (and does not need to be) the mainstream perspective.
> mainstream
What does "mainstream" refer to when we're talking about software development and LLMs? As opposed to "engineers".
This is a very fair question! When I wrote this comment, I was definitely thinking of the "real" mainstream, i.e. users of llm chat to generate text, not software engineers.
But I think there is (and has always been) also a distinction between the "mainstream" of software developers vs people who are working on new tools and capabilities to be used by that "mainstream".
IMO it is certainly true that the most efficient and cost effective was to do "mainstream" software delivery at the moment is hosted frontier models. But for people thinking about "what's next?", it makes a ton of sense to be exploring different models in anticipation of a possible (but certainly not inevitable) sea change.