Posted by ishanz 12 hours ago
When doing agentic development, you need to be in control, at least for now. Every frontier model will still do incredibly stupid stuff, and if you let it cook unchallenged, you'll have a codebase that doesn't scale. Claude will happily keep piling turds upon your tower of turds, but at some point, even an LLM will have a hard time working in it.
When you are at the wheel, the engineering hasn't changed. You're still solving all the same problems, but you can iterate a lot faster. Code is now ~free, and the cost of having a bad idea is now much cheaper, because you can quite literally speak the solution out loud and fix it in a few minutes.
When it comes to employment and other people paying you to code, though, not using AI is increasingly a non-starter for most of us.
Not the hill I would die on.
And everyone having a calculator from grade 4 in school, hasn't made everyone an accountant.
But to be fair, no one has ever experience change as fast as our profession has.
Well now, he just makes me smile, not laugh. I keep my laughs to those who embrace AI yelling "hooray" that they no longer need to code while they pretended to love it for so many years. No, you didn't. You though you did, as many people think they love their partner. Or childs. But to which point? What would you sacrifice for it? Whatever you say, you don't really know, and you probably have to say it anyway for the sake of looking weird, or a so-called bad person.
I don't care of what people think here, so let's do it: I sacrified my social life to my passions. My professional life too. I turned down promotions, even early. Because not coding, or coding less, was not worth any salary. Besides I'm not made to manage teams anyway, they would blame me for being harsh, too demanding, so no, forget it. I want to remain happy, your employees too. Let me do what I love and everything will be fine (though don't take me for a grunt, I have things to say in my field, this is MY field). Yes, I sacrified my life to it. Did you? No, you're not dedicated enough. That's not a shame, maybe I'm the one to blame, maybe I'm the one pointless, the one too much this or too much that, but I am what I am.
So I won't blame him for this article. We're probably the same kind of nerds in that regard, and nerds are just that: living in another dimension. Not only different from a so-called conformity, but something more unfathomable. That's why they marginaly work together: they can't even understand each other completely.
However, I would not have written that I don't use AI. Because I do use AI, but undoubtly and definitey not the way most people do (or pretend to). And probably in a way the author did not really try. No need for the damn Claude and such, come on. Free options are enough for that way of using it. Need to refactor? Why would I ask the AI, I prefer to do it with LSP in my Emacs editor. Takes longer? Maybe. But I'm still aware of the whole thing. My brain cells refresh, like a RAM.
AI does not write my code. It often suggests, so often that it's not rare I ask it firmly to stop writting code, only talking about it, about some logic in a specific area. That's a quite different approach. And even if its code is good, I would be ashamed to kill/yank (you though I would copy/paste? Come on!). First, it's not my style, not my naming conventions, etc. I know we can lead it to use our style (users of Claude always talks about config files for such things), but I fucking don't care. I don't want to depend on this, needless to say what I think about paying for it.
I can say it now: AI is the better companion of the lonely nerd EVER. I wish the author would find it at some point. Not to write code for him, but to help when in doubt on something. Oh damn, I always have doubts in many ways. That's sane to doubt. Never leaving the thinking apart, no way! My brain cells need that.
Also to have clues of the options. Clues of the newer paradigms. Or simply chit-chat about... code. Common practices. Algorithms (more often, it just responds about things I already know, so what? It's not in my mind, let's continue). For example, it's very good to embrace modern C++, there are so many things that changed in that field. It's also good to make sense of sometimes over-verbose compiler errors, especially when you go crazy with your own templates (omg, yes, in that damn context it's a typename, such things). Or to work with unreadable regexps too. Such things again.
That's not an approach for work, for jobs, to make a life. Where we have dead-lines and must respect it as much as we can. I don't work since a year or two, I'm just keeping an eye on technology, as I always did anyway. I always work much more with my own projects, it's too satisfying to stop, or find an excuse to stop; no boredom. The best times are when I do things for myself, for my own dedication. In that context, without dead-line, the use of AI is sooo different from what they're all mumbling about. TBH, I've read many things about it, and NOT A SINGLE time I've read something that closely matches how I use it.
I don't buy time with AI. Most people do, but I definitely don't. On the contrary, I lose time... but for the better. The same way I always lost time digressing of my current goal. What's that new thing it talks about? Wait a minute... wtf? Let's dig it... wow, that's cool! One hour lost, still... not really lost. And again, and free, no charge, not for that. Yes, I need to recall some context sometimes, just enough for what a fresh session needs to know. It does not need to know all my codebase, just that bit, and maybe that bit too, and off we go.
So yes, you see, I have much more fun reading them all than reading that article which, in many ways, makes sense (and that's a breeze in the AI hype), but which is still too stubborn, and believe me, I rarely say that from other people in my loved field ;)
AI helps me learn. Not to code, I do this since ~45 years! No, learn new things, new paradigm, or old ones I may have missed, because coding field is so large you can't know everything. You just have to insist when it seems to just say what you already know. There's always something to learn at some point. One doesn't have to trust it all the way, we have tabs! Dig the docs, the manuals, the APIs... just like before, except the AI often prevents searching for too long for the good terms.
I could write more on it, a lot more, but I'm not writting an article, so let's stop now.
I have 50 years experience programming. I have adapted to change over time to stay employable. And I have cultivated programming as a craft, taking pride in my experience and expertise and knowing how to write working code "by hand."
Then a couple of months ago my employer adopted AI, and I saw almost immediately that I couldn't keep up with it. I could mock it, criticize, point out the silly mistakes it makes, but I found it hard to argue with the results. The programmers using AI (Claude Code in our case) got their work done faster, and I couldn't honestly say their work looked any worse than it had before AI -- in fact I noticed more unit tests, fewer regressions, and abilities enhanced even from the more junior programmers. I had to get on the bus or get off, so I learned how to use AI and have seen my own productivity increase at least 3x.
I think we need to distinguish between programming as a craft -- the thing the author says he enjoys and won't give up -- and programming as labor someone else pays for. Anyone who has worked in the software development business for very long understands that our employers and customers don't care about our craft. They don't care about readabiity, maintainability, technical debt, best practices. They care about getting things done that address the business problems they have, or think they have.
For a long time we -- programmers or whatever euphemism you prefer -- have held the upper hand. Our bosses and customers had no alternative but to pay us to write code for them. They have had to put up with shockingly unpredictable processes that lead to chronic schedule and budget overruns. They have paid for low-quality software, then paid us to do it over. Only a fraction of software projects succeed (go into production and/or result in profit or cost savings), and an even smaller fraction get delivered on time and within budget. I don't mean to imply that we have done that on purpose, but programmers do like to pat themselves on the back and talk about best practices and clean code and every other method and tool "stack" we present as silver bullets, but have little to show for it, for decades.
Now AI comes along and the curtain gets pulled back, and we're indignant, threatened, defensive. A mere bot can't possibly write code as good as I can! The AI companies reek of fraud, corruption, environmental destruction.
No matter what happens to the current crop of AI companies, or how much money gets wasted or grifted, or how much pollution they cause, the LLMs and the coding tools they enable won't go away. They work, regardless of their owners and the damage they cause. Programming will look like this from now on whether we like it or not.
We can retreat into our craft, like the guy with hand tools carving tables in his garage. But I know I can't feed myself or my family with my software craftsmanship, because no one will pay for that anymore. Faced with this reality I had to decide to either leave the business (I am at retirement age anyway) or adapt and continue to get paid. We will all have to make that choice.
In my so-far limited but overall good experience with AI programming I think knowing how to program, and having a lot of experience, gives me a significant advantage over a non-technical manager or a newb programmer. I know how to tell the tool what I want it to do in clear unambiguous terms, and I know how to decide among alternative approaches, and how to judge the result. I won't call myself a "prompt engineer" anytime soon but that describes what I do now. The author can wait for this all to blow over and for programming to go back to hand-crafted code, but I don't think that will happen.
Give me something with an opinion, personality and evidence of battle scars any day. There’s actually extra signal here that helps me process what I’m reading. When I understand where the author is coming from I can extrapolate, attenuate and compare/contrast the content with my existing mental model far better.
My mental AI detector would classify that passage as AI-generated with confidence around 85%. It would be 95% if the list had stopped at three items. Regardless of who wrote it, it's the same style.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...