Comment by insane_dreamer
7 hours ago
> A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI.
I venture to say that this number is small. Most SWEs get into it because they don't view writing code as a "burden".
The people who are "liberated" aren't the SWEs, it's the people higher up the ladder than the SWEs, who can't or don't want to be bothered with coding anymore. For them, managing a fleet of agents is easier than managing a group of SWEs.
Most of the code I was paid to write is a burden. I've spent far more hours writing generic CRUD apps, debugging overly complex javascript tooling (almost always out of date) and other tedious grunt work.
I don't think it's fair to say that all SWEs swing one way or the other. I absolutely love the fact that I will never have to waste time debugging cargo culted, trendy libraries ever again while I am also sad I'll also never to get hand write elegant implementations of interesting problems ever again either (unless for fun).
I would be happy to keep writing code but I'm also happy to be liberated from the type of code I was often paid to write.
Fair. I think a lot depends on what type of coding you were/are being paid to do.
For me typing out code was always the annoying part. The fun comes from fixing problems, optimizing for speed, making the UX flow better and visuals look nice, all things that are on the level of software not code.
Agents help you bang out good code faster if you know how to use them. My relationship to Claude and DeepSeek is somewhere between an IDE, a coworker and a friend (I still have real friends don't worry).
I don't treat it as a world changing magic wand that fundamentally changes the way everything works. It's more like a fast forward button that lets me skip the boring part in exchange for some hand holding. No more dealing with syntax errors or finding trivial bugs.
sure, it works like that if you're still the one doing the thinking and figuring out how to do things, and just using agents for the boring templating and to translate your pseudocode into syntax-free real code, without you having to look up the arguments for every call that you haven't used recently, etc.
but most SWEs are being pushed to delegate the _thinking_ to agents.
so instead of "here's a solution to load this page faster that I came up with: X. Implement this in JS", which is along the lines of what you describe, most people are doing "this page needs to load faster, what's the best way to do that?" claude: "X". "OK, implement X." What fun is that? What's the point of developing skills and acquiring knowledge if you can't use them anymore. that's the loss.
If all you care about is having pages that load fast, then yeah, agents are great. If you care about being the architect who figured out how to load pages faster, then agents take the wind out of your sails.
> For me typing out code was always the annoying part. The fun comes from fixing problems, optimizing for speed, making the UX flow better and visuals look nice, all things that are on the level of software not code.
This always read like
Then you start wondering about the actual level of education of the person and their claims about writing a nice novel.
Code is formal writing. Expressing an idea in such formal forms means you have thought exhaustively about the evolution of the algorithm/process. If you’ve not done that, you can’t guarantee the correctness of that algorithm/process. Is it just toying around with an idea of software?