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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

It seems AI is putting senior developers into two camps. Both groups relate to the statement, "I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that."

The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it. I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time. Do you want to spend all your time building the app user interface, or do you want to focus on that core ability that makes your program unique? Most of us want the latter, but the former takes up so much time.

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> The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it.

I don't think so. I think the first camp does not get paid for programming, while the second camp does.

That's why the first camp is so happy, and why the second camp is not.

> I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time.

It sounds like you're developing for yourself only. Your attitude makes sense, then - you want a $FOO, and now you can have one without paying for it.

I think you can only empathise with the second camp if your ability to eat depends on being able to sell $FOOs.

I am firmly in both camps. On one hand, getting stuff working has its own thrill.

On the other hand, I step back, look at the progress made in just the last year, and realize that not only is my job soon to be gone, but pretty much everyone's job is gone that primarily does knowledge work.

I feel there's now an egg timer set on my career, and I better make the best of the couple of minutes I have left.

It sounds like you don’t particularly care about the user interface, and that’s why you’re okay with delegating it. I think the developers who don’t like delegating to AI are the ones who care about and have strong opinions about all the parts. To them there are no unimportant parts where the details don’t matter.

Similarly, I'm using it to write apps in non-native languages, like rust. My first foray into it led to finding poor documentation examples. AI allows me to create without spending large swaths of time learning minutia.

I'm enjoying it to a point, but yes, it does eliminate that sense of accomplishment - when you've spent many late nights working on something complex, and finally finish it. That's pretty much gone.

> Similarly, I'm using it to write apps in non-native languages, like rust.

This does not make sense; Rust is native.

I assume they mean 'native tongue', as in their day-to-day programming language, or native programming language.

> without spending large swaths of time learning minutia

He probably meant languages he's not proficient with.

delegating UI to the 'not worth my time' pile is how you end up with a poor UI

I feel positive about it. I always want my code to be perfect, and now I can get much closer to that. I can review and nitpick the hell out of it and get it to fix things. I can spend time on elegance and architecture.

I am concerned though that the younger crowd will churn out slop and we’ll race to the bottom. Already i notice software qualify tanking - even Anthopic’s products are super buggy - kinda like going to mass produced cheap consumer products that are much lower quality than their predecessors. Yes, you can choose quality, but most humans are intellectually incapable of seeing beyond price (that’s a psychological fact, not a moan - don’t have references to hand though).

It is weird to see the end of my profession and to be the unlucky ones to suffer it. The answer is to absolutely engage with AI in every way. For some the answer is also to become expert in building it, analogous to machine tool work in the Industrial Revolution.

So long as the amount of software output rises accordingly, we will still have jobs. But we need to reskill.

I’m sure the UI engineers would have a bit of a different take.

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