I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
Rather the issue is they believe they are GOOD at the "journey" and getting to the destination and could compare their journey to others. Another take is they could more readily share their journey or help their peers. Some really like that part.
Now who you are comparing to is not other people going through the same journey, so there is less comradery. Others no longer enjoy that same journey so it feels more "lonely" in a way.
Theres nothing stopping someone from still writing their own code for fun by hand, but the element of sharing the journey with others is diminishing.
I turned 59 this week. I am excited to go to work again. I use Claude every day. I check Claude. I learn new things from Claude.
I no longer need a "UI person" to get something demonstrable quickly. (I've never been a "UI guy"). I've also never been a guy coding during every waking moment of my life as that would have been disastrous for my mental health.
I am retiring in <=2 years, so I am having fun with this new associate of mine.
One pitfall I've managed to avoid all these 36 years I've been at it is not falling in love with the solution. I fall in love with the problems. Claude solves those problems far quicker than I ever could.
I got into “cloud” at 44, got my first job (and hopefully last) at BigTech at 46 and now I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev leading projects at 51.
Every project I’ve done since late 2023 has involved integrating with LLMs and I usually have three terminal sessions up - one with Claude, one with Codex and one where I do command line stuff and testing.
I am motivated by the result, the design and on the system level.
A career sailor on a sailing ship who finds meaning in rigging a ship just so with a team of shipmates in order to undertake a useful journey may find his love of sailing diminished somewhat when his life's skills and passions are abruptly reduced to a historical curiosity.
Other sailors may prefer their new "easier" jobs now they don't have to climb rigging all day or caulk decking (but now they have other problems, you need far fewer of them per tonne of cargo).
And the diesel engine mechanics are presumably cock-a-hoop at their new market.
(This analogy makes no claim as to the relative utility of AI compared to diesel ships over sailing vessels).
At work though the hype sucks the life out of the last part of the job that some people found enjoyable, because complete control is enjoyable. Personally I think work is just doing what someone else wants, rather than pleasing yourself.
i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.
This is a real thing that happens and the analogy is clearly working against you! If you paddle a canoe or rowboat on a river or lake, your experience is made MARKEDLY worse by a motorboat zooming by and scaring the fish, rocking you with wake, smelling up the place with 2-stroke fumes, etc. Even when the motorboats aren't there, the built environment that supports them is bigger and more intrusive.
AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are engineering solutions to real human problems and who just want to tinker with code.
Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results. Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck, because you don't have the necessary oversight in the quality of the output unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving.
- Outsourcing
False. If you "outsource your code" to a compiler and just write higher level language, you're not an engineer. You literally don't own any of your own code, just an abstraction of it written in human language. See how that works? An engineer can delegate -- period.
- "I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me"
If all you do is write code you're not an engineer. I think you fundamentally don't know what engineering is. In a very real sense engineering is what you do when you're not coding. The civil engineer doesn't construct the bridge personally.
- "Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results".
Codemonkeys DON'T CARE about the quality of the end result. They only care about their little corner of the zen garden. Writing real software for real users is by far the worst part of a codemonkeys job.
- "Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck"
Nonsense. The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details. Forest for the trees.
- "unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving."
Who said anything about "saving time"? We're engineering high quality systems. Some of us spend our time at a higher level, thinking holistically about the system, testing multiple concepts and rapidly iterating. Others demand bespoke handwritten code and in the time allowed can barely finish a single concept with a questionable amount of polish. Whatever their first idea is will ship, and they'll have no real ability to justify the architecture other than vibes.
Yes and no. Engineering does involve delegation but what defines an engineer is is what work they do, not what work they pass onto others.
If it helps you understand this, consider the role of an engineer as someone that makes engineering decisions. If you give a specification to a colleague and ask them to write code for you, then you're delegating those engineering decisions. When you write high level code, yes you allow a compiler or interpreter to determine how to turn your instructions into machine code, but you have made engineering decisions in order to design the end result. If you give instructions via product specifications, then you have acted as a project manager or business analyst, not as an engineer.
To use another analogy, imagine you are a chef and you go to eat at a restaurant you don't work in. When you order from the menu, you are not a chef at that moment, even if your background suggests you are capable of being one. Similarly, ordering code from an AI agent does not give you the right to call yourself an engineer when doing so, as you did very little of the real engineering work to produce the end result.
> If all you do is write code you're not an engineer.
Engineering requires thought and application of thought, and if you're outsourcing both then you don't qualify as an engineer.
> The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details.
The devil is in the details. A technical architect that doesn't understand the tradeoffs in the designs they're specifying isn't worth the money they earn.
> Who said anything about "saving time"?
Almost everyone that is selling the benefits of AI. Clearly you haven't been paying attention to industry trends.
Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
Of course. I've seen how sloppy and lazy humans are, and I already use the bridge, and if the safety truly came down to the output of single person, then the risk is already significant.
I must say, I got a chuckle at "using AI to do their calculations". Oh no, my agent is going to write a python script to do basic maths, and check their work against a series of automated tests, the sky is falling!
Not a great comparison. I'd agree with you if it was straight up vibe coding.
But co-creating (which is what I do) I create plan, then step through it with Claude. Claude creates a small part of what I want, I review, tweak or ask Claude why it took that approach if its different.
I know the subject matter of what it is creating, so in this sense it is safe, as long as I am reviewing everything.
It gets dangerous if you just let it create something without any interaction or understanding of what is being created.
It's not so much a project manager. I have something I want to build, I create the plan and work slowly through it with Claude. Stopping at every piece and reviewing as I go.
I can confirm the code is good, but also when it takes a different approach I question why it took that approach. Occasionally I learn something.
> who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
Sometimes you want the app but don't care how it gets created, because its helping you focus on what you really want to do. For example I created a mindmap App in XCode on-par with XMind. Not every feature, but everything I use.
The less coding you do, the less good you will be at making those decisions on code quality. Coding skills atrophy when not used.