Comment by agentultra

I’m the opposite. I don’t believe there is a royal road to understanding anything. For me, the process of programming involves frustration. That is usually when I find my greatest insights.

Syntax isn’t a big deal. Names either. You can look them up. Remember them. Language gotchas are annoying and sometimes problematic.

To me, our job is understanding problems. And for me, understanding the problem involves wrestling with the code. I learn much from modelling problems in code, building theories, testing them.

Once an LLM system has generated some code I haven’t learned anything. Even when I read through the solution. It doesn't require the same activation of my brain. There’s nothing quite like working through the problem yourself.

LLMs definitely feel like they are draining my passion for computers. There were plenty of folks who checked out or were never truly passionate about programming. Now they’re louder than ever. “Nobody cares about code,” and, “optimizing is a waste of time.” Now we don’t even want to understand how it works, or whether it works at all. They repeat the lines their master have told them: get on board or get left behind.

I’m pretty sure I am risking getting, “left behind.” But I’m okay with that. The tech is truly the least interesting thing to me. If I don’t have a career in 10 years… oh well. I’ll still be programming.