> I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.

This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and read and listen to.

I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.

Programming brings me joy in two different ways.

1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.

2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.

These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.

AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.

I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.

I can relate coz once upon a time I enjoyed reading poetic code - which I later found to be impossible to modify or extend.

> Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.

And then I couldn’t relate because no one ever paid me for lines of code. And the hardest programming I ever did was when it took me 2 days to write 2 lines of C code, which did solve a big problem.

I abhorred the LOC success metric because we had to clean up after those who dumped their code diarrhea to fool those who thought every line of code is added value. Not to mention valuing LOC strictly makes you a junior programmer.

E.g. you have to know more to do the following in 2 lines (yes, you can):

‘’’ t = a; a = b; b = a; ‘’’

According to LOC missionaries these 3 lines are more expensive to write and shows that you’re a better programmer than the XOR swap. But it’s actually more expensive to run it than the XOR swap, and it’s more expensive to hire the person who can write the XOR swap. (Not endorsing clever/cryptic code, just making a point about LOC)

So, if the LOC missionaries are out of a job because of LLMs, I will probably celebrate.

“We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of”

I still feel proud when skillfully guiding a set of AI agents to build from my imagination. Especially when it was out of my reach just 6-months ago.

I’m a 49 year old veteran who started at just 10 years old and have continued to find pure passion in it.

There's a commercial building under construction next to my office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping young men are digging with their big excavators they've been using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer.

Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills.

People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing.

It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.

I do not mourn typing in code.

But I am still quite annoyed at the slopful nature of the code that is produced when you're not constantly nagging it to do better

We've RLed it to produce code that works by hook or by crook, putting infinity fallback paths and type casts everywhere rather than checking what the semantics should be.

Sadly I don't know how we RL taste.

I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies.

Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching

Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully automated production.

The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job.

This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (overseeing farm automation, high end handmade furniture, small organic farms), and the factory worker masses (ZIRP enabled tech workers) will move on to more fulfulling work.