Posted by speckx 4 days ago
You really should read the submission before leaving a comment. Or even copy/paste into an LLM to summarize.
Tell me this isn't classism. Tell me this kind of narrative isn't a new norm
That general idiom is old and fairly widely used. There was a Seinfeld episode in 1997 in which Elaine talked about “…not lurching around like a caveman.”
If you’re objecting to criticism of writing code by hand, the phrase is almost invariably used in a self-deprecating way, acknowledging some inefficiency or old-fashioned behavior with comic hyperbole. It’s not criticizing people who write code by hand as such - the author is criticizing themselves for doing something the hard way.
About the "hard way", everything in the article is screaming that OP's new way of coding is the hard way, not the other way around
He should have used OpenAI or Anthropic - instead of using Google, like a Neanderthal.
I’m an AI skeptic, but this ain’t it.
OP explains his enormous and ridiculous struggles yet you say it is irrelevant.
Around me devs are beginning to warm up to the idea, that they are not coders (and neither should I be), but "prompt engineers". When I take too much time on a task, when I can't solve a problem with a push of a button, when I muse about copilot hallucinations in my PR - someone usually comes helpfully to tell me, I need better prompting skills. Have you tried this expression? Have you tried more context? Have you tried with this copy pasted magical formula?
No creative worker in human history was so overjoyed to devalue his or her work and knowledge in such haste.
I remember learning C++ with something like valgrind. I would write stupid code, validate, fix stupid issues.
Others before me learned the harder way.
With LLMs right now I'm learning frontend by just generating the UIs I want.
I'm getting the code/mocks and experimenting.
It's bad code, i will need to adjust, but it helps immensely as a starting point same as valgrind helped in the past.
Trying to learn via searching for info just doesn't work as well with all the flood of spam.
Two more things. Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is rarely converted into good code. And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up. With bad code being good enough (hey, it compiles! it mostly works!), hopefully you and I will be the lucky few to still be in the business five years later.
Most code everywhere is bad code. Nobody cares unfortunately.
> And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up.
Actions of the US gov have caused a recession.
It's hard to find jobs in that environment
Put the blame where it's due.
AI is an excuse.
No company is going to hire now because of that.
There is also heavy bloat of incompetent software developers that needs to be shed.
Edit: Side note of shedding incompetent people
At work, I have a budget for tools, in the past this was handed over to contractors (think accenture).
They would come back with estimates of 1+ months, multiple developers and a manager for something I could do in a week.
They would deliver very poor quality and I had no choice.
With LLMs I can do the same quality of work in 30 minutes, then clean it up for a day and have a much better tool.
That budget is now used for other things and probably will be cut due to economic uncertainty.