Comment by tancop

5 hours ago

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.

2 comments

tancop

insane_dreamer 26 minutes ago

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.

skydhash 4 hours ago

> 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

  Writing sentences was the annoying part. The fun come from sharing ideas, optimizing for brevity, making the rhythm flow better and words more impactful, all things that are on the level of communication, and not grammar.

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?