I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
The downside is that of course the further you stay away from actually playing your instrument, the rustier you will get; this might or might not be an issue, but it is a significant downside, also being away from the technique side means that as the years go by, you might not be able anymore to have an intuitive understanding of "this sounds wrong" and why it does.
I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, but it does feel that agentic coding is a bit like building skill tech debt, the more you do it, the more you'll have to work later to bring back the skills you lost. The meta could be that models will get so good so that only a small percentage of developers will ever need to sully their eyes again with looking at code (same as while when we started most people had at least a passing familiarity with assembly, nowadays nearly nobody does), jury's out on that.
Either way, what before needed a full orchestra of developers, now could be doable by a good conductor and maybe a couple of soloists: how many orchestras will be needed? and what will the section musicians not good enough to be soloists and that don't have an interest in becoming a conductor will do? and how are new conductors going to develop their technical chops if there are no more orchestral jobs?
Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle. By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
Good news: It doesn't.
I just don't have to do the typing, pre-acceptance testing, fuzzing, etc.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
Good for you!
The joy comes from the problem no longer existing, being solved, not from the physical act of typing.
Anyway, let's burn the data centers and become Luddites. Wait, first become Luddites, the we can burn things.
I am not a "programmer", I do "programming".
To which the obvious answer is often: then why didn't you think of it? And if you thought of it, why didn't you iterate on it and polish it to achieve a proper product that actually matched your vision?
For some people, they seem to believe that an idea isn't worth anything, and only the building is. And, even then, they don't really understand that building a proper product (even with vibecoding) takes a lot of effort to get right, because as you build you find more about the domain, about how the product should work, etc. Sure, loads of people vibecode crap, but many don't. They build things with real care over the course of many many many hours.
It's not that I love agile, but this is one of the reasons it exists. I wonder if the people who so openly bash solving a problem through vibecoding (with multiple iterations) also fail to see this value of agile?
To answer your question (acknowledging I don't really know): If all you had to do was get Claude/Codex to work and it came out perfectly very fast, then I believe you did commission it (and I have no problem with that), but, more often that that, you will have built it by iterating on product decisions.
When I "build" products for clients, I am not doing commission development work. In fact, I'm not building it for them -- we are building it together, learning requirements, failing, iterating. Otherwise, I would have just been a code monkey, and that I have sincerely despised for years.
Lastly: at least for now, the impact of knowing how to guide the AI is still very relevant. Good problem solvers who embrace AI completely blow "regular guys" out of the water. Maybe, as models get better, this will not be as prevalent, but you can clearly tell when someone "knows" what they're doing with the AI, even if they NEVER look at the code. The knowledge from the coding days is definitely partly transferable.
But most software engineers I’ve worked with are not like that. In fact, they want to be as far away from the customer/user as possible and they love the coding for coding’s sake. I’m afraid those are the first to be replaced by AI as their skills don’t extend beyond writing code, which is probably why they are screaming so much now.
Building things with LLMs is the closest I can get (perhaps even surpass?) the feeling I had as a kid, learning to code.
I feel rather sad that most (though luckily not all) of my friends despise AI, as I feel a (small, but relevant) part of the connective tissue we had is sort of gone. I'm in love with what I can do, I've re-gained the superpowers I had back in college (and even before that) and I can't really share that with them (and they can't really share their concerns and frustrations with me). In two weeks of vacation (actually: in 1 week of those) I finally got around to tackling 5 different projects I had in the back of my mind, mostly for fun (but one of them is genuinely generating some income as well) -- this is amazing, but I have actively avoided talking about this with them, bar sharing a link to some of the things (and even that I'm feeling some regret over)
It's so fun to tinker around with everything! Modding a game, revitalizing abandonware with custom patches, building a harness to know how it works or just...you know...building what is in my mind, whenever, wherever, without it taking foreeeveeeeeeer.
I used to think what I loved was coding, but I have really come to realize I liked both building and coding. The latter I haven't really done much of in more than a year and....it doesn't annoy me at all? I know for a fact I loved doing it, but I can't really say I _miss_ doing it? Maybe after 20 years it just wasn't the same? Maybe the rush from watching my mind materialize into real things so fast is camouflaging it? Who knows...
Not to mention that most everyone else in my surroundings outside of the tech bubble is doing amazing things with AI. Cool websites, music that moves me to tears, random fun games and just, in general, clearly managing to focus more on what they want, on their goals, on their imagination and less on their work. There are exceptions, but the trend is that AI has enabled them to do more of what they want and less of what they have to, and I love that.
I completely accept that, for some people, the fun is/was in coding by hand. And that it's terrible that they'll likely not be able to earn a living just doing that relatively soon. What I have difficulty accepting is the outright bashing and hating on everything AI-related (and, yes, I hate hype too, but have you LOOKED AROUND AND SEEN THIS NEW WORLD?!). I can sort of accept it based on ethical grounds, but very rarely is it actually that. I guess people are just venting and firing in all directions due to how much this has shaken their lives and livelihood (and that, indeed, I can understand).
Anyway, this world is AMAZING! I am 100% with you. Especially because I don't even type (to the agents) anymore. I just voice-to-text, with barely any filter. I've often described it as the closest I've ever felt to truly controlling the computer with my mind, because I don't have to slow down my thoughts to write them. Sort of incredibly liberating.
Unfortunately, LLMs have been shoved everywhere in a years-long desperate scramble to capture the market, so we might as well get used to them while the bubble pops and the winners cash their bets.
> What scares me most is how they allow people who don't fully know what they're doing to deploy software, especially corporate software.
Which is why I also think some people get such disparate experiences. If your organization is allowing clueless people to confidently throw stuff built by LLMs at mission-critical problems, that does seem more like an organizational problem than an LLM problem. (A related problem: the amount of people who keep shoving claude shit in front of us, thinking they've "edited" it enough to not sound like it came from it. I can spot it from a mile away and usually make myself loud about it if I have the power to stop it. AI is not an excuse for mediocrity.)
There's so much to hate about LLMs, and there's so much to love. And since we've sort of ended up in this world of constant false dichotomies, this kind of nuance gets lost in the trenches.
Of course LLMs in the wrong of clueless people are bad. Of course the way in which these models were trained is shameful and it's criminal that people are having their work stolen. Of course we need to find ways of dealing with slop. Of course it's bad for the environment at the moment (and so on). The list goes on and on, I know that.
But on either side of this debate (which SHOULD NOT HAVE TWO SIDES -- that's THE problem), people just tend to lump everything together. Your example is one some acquaintances repeatedly throw my way, and I'm left wondering if they have even thought that they're just showing me how broken their org is, not how bad the tech is? But, nope, they turn to me and go "AI bad bad"...
(I will say, though, the people around me I mentioned getting immense benefits from AI outside of tech are most definitely not addicted to it)
Absolutely!
But is there much more to "building with AI" than chasing dopamine? I would say for many, the answer is no.