> opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option.
I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my current state.
I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer.
I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This is in some ways the worst of both worlds, but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia while still getting pretty good code out, so I consider it superior to how I worked before. I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.
CC has made some pretty dumb stuff in my projects but I don't resent those occurrences. They taught me (more accurately: reminded me, because I already knew but was not applying that knowledge too often) very valuable lessons on code quality -- that's still a dark area to this day and every ray of light on it is valuable for the future programming.
To me programming with LLMs made me a better programmer. But yes, I don't just rubber-stamp PRs.
It also finally allowed me to be less of a code monkey and more of an architect and a backend lead than before. Which I was really missing.
I think this is going to be a big deal for many programmers in the long run. "Flow" comes from feeling faster as much as it does from actually being faster in the moment. Perhaps more. And yesterday's good experience leads to today's motivation.
I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did.
Nowadays I see people doing far more in a month than I could in a year and I feel like its all a waste, like I just spent the past few years transcribing a phonebook while standing next to a photocopier.
I don't know if that'll ever change. I can't even pretend I was doing something prestigious and artisan like watchmaking because I wasn't a good programmer beforehand.
Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.
Here is the similar perspective: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html
I was misunderstood you if you intend to write code by hand, I still did, I use AI to learn by example, but I write the real code myself, AI can help me improve the code. I learned a lot.
Nearly all of that passion vanished this year, and I've been struggling to replace it. I know I'm much better than the machine now, but the lines are starting to blur, and some of the small puzzles of day-to-day have been completely automated away.
We've birthed a lot of puzzle solvers that enjoyed programming, and I'm sure many of them will move on to something else that scratches the same itch. I'm keen on learning what that will turn out to be.
Now with LLMs I find myself doing small projects that interest me or have some utility for me outside of work, and doing a lot more development in the codebases at work outside of just review/docs/arch than I was before. Also making small tools that I find pleasant/useful but were not important enough to spend time on before.
This is not a serious suggestion.
> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.
Based on word from my friends who work in the field, a lot of it is people who have a lot of respect for the field, and a lot of professional respect for eachother. It's also a field I feel is unlikely to suffer from the same kind of scams that are taking over software while still offering an engaging environment.
It's also work with real-world impact, which is nice, though obviously comes with its challenges.
Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"