I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that.
Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.
- Volume. Kill the backlog! 8 agents in terminals, frantically!
- Ambition. Do the things you always want to do! You have the power!
- Clarity. Oh god I have to figure out what to do next.
That last one is honestly super-hard, but it's also the most valuable. Like, do you want to wake up every day and find new work, because you understand the machine better than everybody else? I know a bunch of people that love that stuff, but also a bunch that don't. I totally get that the transition is hard.
Doing this sort of project is giving me a glimpse of what it is going to be like managing software projects. As software engineers we have to learn how to manage much bigger changes and in a much higher level of abstraction. I personally don't think models are good enough for this level of automation yet but in a weekend that I had access to Fable I could see how things are going to change soon. Most of criticism towards LLM coding was not applicable to Fable. I'm not hyping anything, just an observation.
The DJ analogy is useful actually. I live in Berlin and essentially everyone is a DJ but only a few get to make money from it. The difference is of course taste but also grit and how well those people leverage available tools to them. A good DJ knows how to use the tools and has a good understanding of the market. Different skill that a musician but nevertheless a valuable skill
Maybe, but the author's DJ analogy in the post was rather off the mark. Skill-wise, DJing is actually a perfect example of "it used to be hard" in pretty much every aspect -- beatmatching on vinyl, mixing in key, discovering new records, building and reaching a fanbase, getting distribution for mixes, physically carrying tons of records around and sometimes getting them stolen or damaged.
If everyone is a DJ now, it's because software and technology has made it so much easier than it used to be. Although to be clear, I completely agree with your comment on how successful DJs are the ones who leverage modern tools and understand the market.
But in terms of the analogy in the original post, the author is making some weird comparison between guitar players and DJs, which is totally apples to oranges... not to mention that selling out stadiums solo has never been easy for anyone, regardless of year or whether you're a guitar player or a DJ.
Was thinking of a comparison, cars are faster than walking. Imagine saying, no I prefer only walking. It is healthier than sitting in a car and your legs will atrophy. That is very much true (and we can see the consequences in car dominated societies). Nevertheless, for many industries cars are very important. You don’t say, I would rather carry all these pallets by hand rather than use a forklift.
LLMs are similar in my mind. They turbocharge your output in all senses but is less holistic than hand-coding. Like cars, you are making a trade off but I don’t think it’s fully a replacement. We still walk with cars in our lives. And we don’t eschew cars because they are “worse” for you than walking. We adapt and make tradeoffs
... or Google Gemma or Mistral.
The freedom pendulum looks like it swung away from individuals.
(huge fan of your blog/pelicans btw)
If you're a developer who's always been happy to build the next CRUD API endpoint and never felt frustrated at having to solve variants of the same problem over and over again, this new era is a pretty nasty shock.
I'm never sure how common that archetype is though.