I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end.
Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.
Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making things.
So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm making more software (and hardware) than ever, mostly just to scratch an itch.
Those people that really love it should be fine. Hobbies aren't supposed to make you money anyway.
I don't have much interest in maintaining the existence of software development/engineering (or anything else) as a profession if it turns out it's not necessary. Not that I think that's really what's happening. Software engineering will continue as a profession. Many developers have been doing barely useful glue work (often as a result of bad/overcomplicated abstractions and tooling in the first place, IMO) and perhaps that won't be needed, but plenty more engineers will continue to design and build things just more effectively and with better tools.
Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.
Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.
Once I can describe something well, that’s most of the interesting part (to me) done.
I had some pieces of code I wrote I was quite proud of: well documented, clear code yet clever designs and algorithm.
But really what always mattered most to me was designing the solution. Then the coding part, even though I take some pride in the code I write, was most a mean to an end. Especially once I start having to add things like data validation and API layers, plotting analysis results and so many other things that are time consuming but easy and imho not very rewarding
And now looking back its an obvious outcome. The search engine of the time was the best way to find websites. But those websites grew in quantity and volume over time with information.. that information as we know is/was a vital input for LLMs.
I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard.
Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.
Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking...
You know. Chores.
Not my software, I actually enjoy building that
We are paid to do the tedious stuff because it is tedious. If we actually ever succeed in automating away the tedious stuff, we're out of work
Sure I would love to be working on some cutting edge challenging stuff, but the reality is it has been much more realistic to do the tedious stuff for pay instead
I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions.
Isn’t the future great?
I don't believe any of this
Great. Once your boss notices your actual work has decreased, he'll adjust compensation, increase workload, or both.
Can't imagine you really think "the market forces" all point toward a utopia for the workers? We're all just gonna get paid for 2 hours of work a day and post pics from the beach with a special shout-out to Claude?
But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them better, because each one provided so much more value.
When the machines are able to do the hard stuff better than humans, that's when we'll really be in trouble.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...
If you can prove otherwise, show some stats.
If you're going to spend a pretty good chunk of your lifetime eating, you might as well get good at it so you can enjoy the food you make
Thread seems to be saying LLMs are great because they do the dirty work and leave the fun work to humans. The counter-point is not exactly that LLMs aren't capable of doing dirty-work, it's that the nature of work isn't going to split so cleanly.
And cooking is a good example. Cooking is work. And slop. And it's also incredibly rewarding and creative, if you want it to be. Robots can help along that entire journey.
Maybe this is the core point: "cooking is a solved problem" that's how engineers always think. Except it's not. And 100% automation is still not going to break that discussion so cleanly.
> Maybe this is the core point: "cooking is a solved problem" that's how engineers always think.
But it isn’t, that’s a lazy stereotype of a subset.
No such incentive exists for building software
People don’t only build software because they have to.
Carpenter told her he'd be happy to, it would take 8 weeks longer, cost more, and probably wouldn't look any better than the regular way
Can we stop with the lazy analogies? Everyone's read some variant of this on here by now. Come up with something that's genius to read.
Do you find there are zero chores in software development and everything is an identical delight?
And it isn't so much that one approach may be better than another. That is going to depend on context and available resources and more. What we are seeing is the short term being served to the absolute exclusion of thought about the longer term. Maybe if that goes fast and well enough then it will be sufficient, but churning out code bases that endure is a challenge that is only starting to be tested.
Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.
I don't mean that it's unsetting that people enjoy different parts of the job, I enjoy many of those same aspects, but it's sad to me how few people around me care about the aspect that I originally fell in love with, which was the bedrock of our profession. Specifically, the work of solving problems with the machine/human shared language of code, instead of just writing out plain-english specs of what you want to have happen.
> The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.
So what? Their "just get it done" POV is far more common in this industry than mine (apparently), and the enjoyment they get from their job isn't being actively optimized away.
Whereas I always liked to design and build a useful result. If it isn't useful I have no motivation to code it. Looking up APIs, designing abstractions, fixing compiler errors is just busywork that gets in the way.
I loved programming when I was 8 years old. 30+ years later the novelty is gone.
If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thinking. I don’t think many of us spend time, wondering if the welder enjoys the torch or if a cheaper shop weld is robbing the human welder of the satisfaction of a field weld. And we don’t shed so much ink wondering if digital spreadsheets are a moral good or not because perhaps they robbed the accountant of the satisfaction of holding a beautiful quill in hand dipped expertly in carefully selected ink. You’re lucky if you enjoy your job, I think most of us find a way to learn to enjoy our work or at least tolerate it.
I just wish all the moaning would end. Code generation is not new, and that the state of the art is now as good at translating high-level instructions into a program at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers is a huge win for humanity. Work that could be trivially automated, but is not only because of the scarcity of programming knowledge is going to start disappearing. I think the value creation is going to be tremendous and I think it will take years for it to penetrate existing workflows and for us to recognize the value.
I don't think this is the flex you think it is... in my experience, the bottom 10% of programmers are actively harmful and should never be allowed near your codebase.
The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I would say that state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output.
> the state of the art today is not as good as the very best
and
> state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output
are not contradictory. If the models completely surpass any individual's productive output, doesn't that mean they're better than the best humans? Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "surpassing productive output." Are you talking about raw quantity over quality? I mean, yeah... but I could also do that with a bash script.
It would be contradictory if we were talking about a human sure, but we're not. We're talking about a machine that can read thousands of words in seconds and spit thousands in slightly longer.
>Are you talking about raw quantity over quality? I mean, yeah... but I could also do that with a bash script.
Well except you can't. You can't replace what LLMs can do with a bash script unless your bash script is calling some other LLM.
Caught my eye. I do think we should wonder and hold intentionality around products, especially digital products, like the spreadsheet. Software is different. It's a limitless resource with limitless instantaneous reach. A good weld is beautiful in its own right, but it's not that.
The spreadsheet in particular changed the way millions of people work. Is it more productive? Is an army of middle-managers orienting humanity through the lens of a literal 2x2cm square a net good?
I say we should moralize on that.
i write less code than my AI-using coworkers but I have as much or more impact. Coding wasn't so hard that I need to spend time learning a new proprietary tech stack with a subscription fee lol. I believe plenty of engineers did suck enough and computers to benefit tho. That is where Anthropic makes their money.
It can be unpleasant to participate in a community of differing opinions and experiences. I still think it's worth showing up. If I hadn't then your perspective would have been missed too.
That being said, yea enterprise coding can be extremely mundane and it’s setup for learning it deeply then finding a way to do it faster. I’m likely in the 90% range of my work being done by Claude, but I’m working in a domain I’ve got years of experience with hand coding and stepping through code in my debugger.
I think this latter piece is the challenge I’m struggling with. There is an endless amount of work that can be done at my company but as long as the economy is in a weird spot, I’m being led to believe that ai is making me expendable. This is a consequence of the fact that glue work represents 80% of my output (not value). The other 20% of time at work is exploring ideas without guaranteed results, its aligning stakeholders, its testing feasibility with mvps or experts from another area I need some help with. If glue work represents tangible output and conceptual work is something that may not actually have value my manager wants me to explore it, I’m just a glue guy in enterprise while I’m left chasing the dragon of a cool project for me to really sink my teeth into. That project is just a half baked bad idea from someone disconnected with reality. Glue work is measurable in LoC (however useless a metric it is measurable) and it’s certainly paying the bills.
If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.
The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.
Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve my exact needs.
You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it to be worth it, not the entire app.
Doordash is the future of home cooking.
Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.
edit: I think you might mean vibe coding (and those infamous things that use millions of tokens with no limit) but for programmers using LLMs to code is literally just a tool like anything else and the cost is barely relevant. It's not comparable to contracting out code, and it's not even comparable to eating out in terms of cost!
I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.