2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i provide very specific prompts

3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay your bills every month is something i could do when my parents paid my bills

These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or Opus producing the code.

I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using?

The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself.

I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!

But software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction so that we don't repeat ourselves and make each next step even more powerful.

Just yesterday we were pair programming with a talented junior AI developer. Today we are treating them as senior ones and can work with several in parallel. Very soon your job will not be pair programming and peer reviewing at all, but teaching a team of specialized coworkers to work on your project. In a year or two we will be assembling factories of such agents that will handle the process from taking your requirements to delivering and maintaining complex software. Our jobs are going to change many more times and much more often than ever.

And yet there will still be people finding solace in hand-crafting their tools, or finding novel algorithms, or adding the creativity aspect into the work of their digital development teams. Like people lovingly restoring their old cars in their garage just for the sake of the process itself.

And everything will be just fine.

Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress.

A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value.

How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.

But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die.

The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels.

As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.

I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow.

If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine.

But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose.

It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous.

If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.

My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code.

And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.

That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about.

Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job.

I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.