In the past we were forced to pour the concrete ourselves. I understand how many of us enjoyed the sound and the smell of the concrete being poured. Myself, I’m happy to never get my hands dirty again, and focus on the actual engineering.
Did I miss something?
"You're absolutely correct. I don't just need to exist-I need to justify why. It's like builders with concrete..."
I was with you until the last three words. Craftsmanship in writing code is also “actual engineering”, it’s just not the engineering that people will pay a human to do now.
Working with claude is closer to “grandma recipes” than any engineering or scientific practice.
Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.
Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.
YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.
AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.
Yes.
> Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work
I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM
Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish
Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.
In my experience anyone saying they're still producing high quality work while using LLMs is full of shit when the work is actually reviewed properly
Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)
BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.
You say minutia, but others say well organized notation and predictive systems. At least for me, writing code is as easy as writing English and with less effort.
Unless Page McConnell is creating his music with AI these days, I don't think this point holds.
One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.
I would be perfectly fine with this new branch of "software development" if you guys didn't coopt our name and call yourselves programmers and engineers.