Comment by sanderjd

1 month ago

I also experience this as a great loss, but honestly yes, I can't get excited about perfecting the craft of writing computer code now that there are AI systems that have done so. I'll always be sad about this! But the flip side is that I'm way more excited about what I can do with software, now that it's so much easier to write.

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sanderjd

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huurtehoog  1 month ago

I experience quite the opposite. I'm quite excited about the value my skills are gaining in relative terms. An entire generation of potential competition is getting addicted to the subsidized corporate tooling. Voluntarily!

  • PaulKeeble  1 month ago

    What I fear is the future career path for manual programming is fixing AI generated systems. I suspect it will pay very well because you will be finding and fixing things the AI driven work can't. It is going to be soul destroying as reading AI code is deeply unpleasant in the same way reading the articles is.

    • huurtehoog  1 month ago

      I never go by pay. I won't fix bad systems whatever their provenance because trying to understand poorly coded software is very unpleasant.

      I go by interesting problems and I like being able to chose from more options due to lessened expertise competition. Why people voluntarily renounce expertise is beyond me, but they are and I welcome the increase in choices of engagement I have been experiencing.

      I would never engage in uninteresting work at any rate of pay, and working with LLM output directly or mediated is quite uninteresting to me.

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    • sanderjd  1 month ago

      AI is a very useful tool for finding problems in codebases.

      I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM based tooling" seems pretty unlikely.

  • bspammer  1 month ago

    The future is open models running on your device. No subsidized corporate tooling required. There will never be a reckoning for the people who are letting their coding skills atrophy.

    I don't like it either, but that's the way it is.