bah9

"The goal had always been" - who's goal? Company? Employee? Humanity? I didn't get your point. I enjoyed certain type of work and now it's dead. I still can be relevant doing much less enjoyable work.

>In this context AI is nothing but good news, with proper attitude and skill it helps achieving the goal better, faster.

It is good news if you are in a lower spectrum of technical literacy. What AI did is significantly lower requirement for hard skills for problem solving. Before AI gap between smart and experienced dev and smart junior was gigantic, not it is almost non-existing. If you consider yourself good programmer, you are now way less valuable

>we need understanding of the tech-stack atleast in general

Yes, but i am ~10 years beyond that point. I have solid computer science background, and i feel like anything above that now waste of my time, because i can just ask LLM and apply my fundamental cs knowledge. It might sounds fun for someone, but for me it is not challenging

I am MLOps in a big tech company. My work is tightly coupled with training and online inferencing SOTA LLM's. Doesn't change anything in the equation

Came to the same conclusion as your point number one. Yes, i don't love my job anymore. It is painful, but... most of the people living like this their whole life and i was blessed to do what i love. And i still have well paying job, so i can retire earlier

Sadly, I am not. But I enjoy manual labor. I am leaning towards construction/electrics. But most likely just wait couple more years and retire with enough money to never work again

The irony is, my work is to train frontier llm's, so my own "child" killed my lifelong passion

Thanks!

What did you found for yourself?

What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living

All code has no worth, any code can be replicated in a short amount of time. Only ideas is valuable. Not saying it is bad thing, but i enjoyed opensource, and now i don't see any value in supporting my project and contributing to other's. No one care anymore.

>architecture Give me a reason why agent can't create great architecture when enough context is provided?

I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. Seems like most of them are happy to "be able to do great things without boring coding"... but gathering information and setting a task is an entirely different profession.

I'm always curious, what are those "great things" requiring deep technical knowledge and years of expertise that these visionaries can finally provide with the help of LLMs?

I almost feel ashamed/mentally ill when i am reading how everyone is happy that their true visionnaire potential is finally unlocked while i just like to solve my silly puzzles.

Ye ye, you can create tons of pretty useful software with agents nowdays and everyone who enjoyed coding are dinosaurs, i get it.

Programming was a chess for me. AI is a chess engine. For sure, i cared about winning (i.e. deliver product), but i have zero enjoyment from winning if i used a chess engine

Somehow, a lot of people can't understand me. Seems like 90% of programmers hate chess. They only enjoyed winning. Sad thing is, now every "guy bagging groceries" can win, what is exactly your value?

Nope. You can't. Expectations and deadlines aligned with code agent usage. No one let you spent x5 time coding things yourself

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"?

"but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code.

Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack

Idk. I don't feel that "projects" have any value nowadays. Firstly, you don't get any respect, people just thinking "I could prompt that too". Secondly, if anyone can do that, what's the point?

We have so much stuff coming nowdays that no one care

As i said, most of the devs never enjoyed coding. But even on their place I wouldn't be happy. Now way less qualified people can do their work.

Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier

Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution

Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it

Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority

And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it

"I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?

One thing I can't understand: why work as SWE if you don't really care about technical side, but you care about product? Managering position is much more suitable

I also don't understand why care about result if you are working in a big company and you have fixed salary. Most of the time result isn't about better user experience, but about profits for shareholders. I guess all people are different

It won't be close. And result will be better. Anyway, this is different type of work

Ah, this sounds so unfun to me. As I thought, actual "thinking" is providing context due to bad, not self sufficient, documentation

I think I am just not result driven. I like to do stuff myself, not providing info to some super intelligence to do cognitive work

This role is also require way less qualifications and cognitive ability. You need local knowledge, not fundamental knowledge: why in this exact company things the way it is. Mostly not transferable

>Now I’m addicted to architectures

But architecture creation can also be delegated to ai if you give agent enough context about functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc. Your work is to be feedback loop mechanism between people and llm, no? Please, give me encouraging examples of technical tasks that cant be delegated to ai with accurate prompting

Not the same. Longshoremen become unemployed, I didn't. I just don't this new type of work as a prompt engineer and would never choose it as my career

I am not denying that AI is better for productivity. Can't even say I am anti AI

It is just made my work unfun for me, that's it. I always loved problem solving, writing code, thinking about architecture. Now all of this is delegated to LLM's. Only things left is providing documentation and evaluate solutions. Evaluation part is present only because documentation/harness isn't perfect

Your are not building software together with Claude, you are only a context provider. You may think "ah, but my expertise is irreplaceable", that's false.

Another side effect is that code doesn't have any value. You can code new search engine from scratch and people will think "huh, I could prompt that too in a weekend"

I guess not many people liked writing code like I did (codeforces red btw, but this is also dead now), so effect of AI is net positive. But I give up. I need 2 more years to earn enough for the rest of my life, and I will never work in coding related field again

The irony is I have unlimited tokens, because my work is to create and deploy SOTA inference solutions for LLM's in one very well known provider. I've used all types of LLM's for a large range of problems for a long time, so this is not a hysterical post after discovering Claude for the first time

Because work just became unfun. You are context provider to LLM.

What is exactly your work? Give context to llm, review, update context. Navigating some sort of super intelligence thru your company's harness is not the same as writing code and creating ideas from scratch. And I don't understand what's fun in that

Yes, you can ship software faster, make corporation even more money. Why is this even important for regular worker? I liked the craft itself

Ahh, famous "thinking", also known as "write couple more prompts, answer llms questions and combine results". Pretty exciting

"shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect" aka write couple more prompts and combine results. Pretty exciting

AI basically killed my joy for programming. I've been working as swe in bigtech for 8 years. I like learning stuff, actually coding stuff with my hands, gather information and understanding before implementing, polish my code. Thats all gone

Now I am just a monkey thats: 1) add enough context, description and harness to an agent 2) review ouput and repeat 1) if context is lacking

It was bottom to top: from understanding to implementation. You were the owner. Now it is top to bottom: get implementation first, try to get understanding later. Thinking is also delegated. "Think" nowadays is "reformulate,answer questions, add context, try again". This doest feels like I am doing the work, this feels like I am a limiting factor here

Another side effect is that any code now have 0 value. No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. People seeing your work and think "ye, I could vibe code that too with enough time" even if this is not true

And my work isn't css and html (with all respect). It is mostly high performance clusters, parallel computing, OS, low level, SOTA online llm inference etc

Now I am seriously considering blue collar job, as I have more joy building stuff with my hands than to be a passenger/context generator to an ai. I am not a business driven person, I don't really care how much money my company earns (sorry). I just like to solve technical puzzles and think hard

P.S. yes, there are corner cases ai can't do well: non trivial, highly specific algorithms and implementations; complex patches to gigantic multi domain proprietary code bases, but that's like 5% of my work

But... I am llm power user for more than a year and a half now. I cant delegate exactly because ive reviewed a lot of llm's code, and it is never good enough for me to step down from reviewing everything manually. I can understand how you can vibe code dashboard or tests, but vibe code your entire backend without checking it thru carefully? Madness.