This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.)
https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output
Then I turned them into weird proteins
https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output
(As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
Shell scripting was something that I failed to get any real traction with for decades, and since letting AI help me write dozens of shell scripts, I find that I have gained a basic level of proficiency. (i.e. I found that I had become relatively fluent in writing them even without assistance, which surprised me!)
It ties in with the Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. More volume in = more opportunities for brain to find the patterns, and learn them naturally.
That doesn't work for the approach where you don't look at the code at all, though. Which seems to depend on your goals for the project.
For the boids thing, the math isn't something I enjoy doing manually anyway (I've done that for the last 15 years and it always felt like pulling teeth), so the main learning I'd get there would be at the applied level... How to tweak the Perlin noise to get the result I want, rather than how or why it works in the first place.
How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then the effort to produce that code is lauded while the nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult?
I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming easy, even trivial, to be that dysfunctional "10x" coder, and dramatically harder to be the competent maintainer. And the existence of AI tools will reinforce the culture gap rather than reducing it.
Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
It only sounds like music.
> Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision.
Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people won't necessarily pay for it.
The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning), considering in other industries, how many people can only enjoy what they do outside of work.
It's a passion for me too, but LLMs don't change this for me. Do they change it for you?
Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is a passion in itself.
There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a passion.
My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost noone does.