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Is a statement like this any different than someone saying developers needed modern IDEs 20 years ago? Yet we still have people in the industry using vim or ema

Is a statement like this any different than someone saying developers needed modern IDEs 20 years ago? Yet we still have people in the industry using vim or emacs, and are successful. I will occasionally ask Copilot for something when I’m in a hurry, and the there is some minor thing I don’t care about that someone is telling me needs to get done. The other 99% of the time, I’m doing it myself. Any time I reach for AI instead of doing it myself, I’m learning less, growing less, and understanding my code less. Why would anyone want this?

deleted 2y ago
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lz400 2y ago
I think it's more like the move to cloud. It didn't make developers obsolete but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps.
- dboreham 2y ago
  People are still being sysadmins and dbas, with new titles. It's just the MBAs that think they're gone.
  - majormajor 2y ago
    Now you get to pay a team of system engineers AND you get to pay Amazon crazy monthly bills! But you get multiple availability zones and regions with much lower capital cost! (But do you need them?)
- gregjor 2y ago
  No. Moving to cloud computing only obsoleted managing physical hardware. System admins and DBAs just as necessary as before. In my experience even more necessary because managers and programmers think they don’t need sysadmins or DBAs until they have messed things up so bad they have to call in an expert.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps. Er, that's the same thing. The only change is that HR thinks my position is labeled "devops engineer" now instead of "sysadmin", but it's the same job.
bdangubic 2y ago
once you realize you are 30-40-50..% slower than your peers you will not only want it but need it to keep being employed. saying “i am learning less, growing less…” is just so amazingly shortsighted, like farmers when first tractors arrived going “fuck this, imma walk this field in 100 degree weather - doing it myself”(sound familiar?).
- grayhatter 2y ago
  I reject the assertion that it's slower. But even if I didn't, I'd still choose the team that delivers 1 month later with high quality code, over the team that cranks out dozens of half broken features they have no idea how to support. Mandating I spend the same amount on a team able to barely maintain that team's mistakes. I know I'm just making the "buy once, cry once" argument, and I understand that's "not how business works" but I'm an engineer, not a manager trading company interest for a promo.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    sounds fun but your days are numbered, much like the farmer I mentioned in the previous comment were when the first tractors rolled into town…
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      To extend the analogy, I'm reminded of the pets vs cattle debate in the context of managing computer systems, and how that distinction continues to shake out. I suspect that as personal computing moves toward cloud computing, following businesses, we will see tension between local-first AI solutions and cloud AI products. Seeing as how the same megacorps that build personal computer pets and pet products are building cloud computing AI cattle products with AI that gives the benefits of pets with some of the upsides of cattle as well. Local compute vs cloud compute is not the same distinction as that between pets vs cattle, but it has many of the same market participants, and with both Microsoft and Apple making moves to bundle AI capabilities with other cloud products for free with subscription value-add-on features is interesting. These features entice users into the vendor walled gardens, nudging users subtly away from local-first pets. https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/ https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...
greenhat76 2y ago
I still use vim, has all the features "modern ides" use. It just isn't a gui.
marcosdumay 2y ago
Well, it's actually different. The impact of the "modern" IDEs of 20 years ago was distinctly measurable, and sensibly perceptible by anyone that tried them. At the same time, it's not even clear if the gain from LLMs is even positive. But if your claim was that neither was relevant enough to change the overall noisy productivity of developers, than yeah. At least not positively.
- beeflet 2y ago
  modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows because they bundle the compiler and text editor and debugger together, and installing and configuring anything on windows is a pain of wizards and menus, especially if you want those programs to talk to each other correctly. I've had jobs where we have spent entire days configuring and installing visual studio and related software and activating all of the licenses and connecting all the databases. But on linux you can just can just figure it out once and "su install compiler-version text-editor-version debugger-version && cp dotfiles ~/.config"
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows Nah, the turn of the century IDEs were better enough that almost all the text editors adopted the relevant feature. We mostly do not have pure text editors like there were back then. There's nano, and notepad++, but on the traditional holdouts, vi became an IDE, and emacs, that was already an IDE turned into a multi-language one too. That said, those features were compelling enough for every editor to adopt, but didn't change the picture enough so that people had no choice but to use them. It is still perfectly viable to not use the IDE features of your favorite editor.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lz400 2y ago

I think it's more like the move to cloud. It didn't make developers obsolete but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps.

dboreham 2y ago
People are still being sysadmins and dbas, with new titles. It's just the MBAs that think they're gone.
- majormajor 2y ago
  Now you get to pay a team of system engineers AND you get to pay Amazon crazy monthly bills! But you get multiple availability zones and regions with much lower capital cost! (But do you need them?)
gregjor 2y ago
No. Moving to cloud computing only obsoleted managing physical hardware. System admins and DBAs just as necessary as before. In my experience even more necessary because managers and programmers think they don’t need sysadmins or DBAs until they have messed things up so bad they have to call in an expert.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps. Er, that's the same thing. The only change is that HR thinks my position is labeled "devops engineer" now instead of "sysadmin", but it's the same job.

bdangubic 2y ago

once you realize you are 30-40-50..% slower than your peers you will not only want it but need it to keep being employed. saying “i am learning less, growing less…” is just so amazingly shortsighted, like farmers when first tractors arrived going “fuck this, imma walk this field in 100 degree weather - doing it myself”(sound familiar?).

grayhatter 2y ago
I reject the assertion that it's slower. But even if I didn't, I'd still choose the team that delivers 1 month later with high quality code, over the team that cranks out dozens of half broken features they have no idea how to support. Mandating I spend the same amount on a team able to barely maintain that team's mistakes. I know I'm just making the "buy once, cry once" argument, and I understand that's "not how business works" but I'm an engineer, not a manager trading company interest for a promo.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  sounds fun but your days are numbered, much like the farmer I mentioned in the previous comment were when the first tractors rolled into town…
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    To extend the analogy, I'm reminded of the pets vs cattle debate in the context of managing computer systems, and how that distinction continues to shake out. I suspect that as personal computing moves toward cloud computing, following businesses, we will see tension between local-first AI solutions and cloud AI products. Seeing as how the same megacorps that build personal computer pets and pet products are building cloud computing AI cattle products with AI that gives the benefits of pets with some of the upsides of cattle as well. Local compute vs cloud compute is not the same distinction as that between pets vs cattle, but it has many of the same market participants, and with both Microsoft and Apple making moves to bundle AI capabilities with other cloud products for free with subscription value-add-on features is interesting. These features entice users into the vendor walled gardens, nudging users subtly away from local-first pets. https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/ https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...

greenhat76 2y ago

I still use vim, has all the features "modern ides" use. It just isn't a gui.

marcosdumay 2y ago

Well, it's actually different. The impact of the "modern" IDEs of 20 years ago was distinctly measurable, and sensibly perceptible by anyone that tried them. At the same time, it's not even clear if the gain from LLMs is even positive. But if your claim was that neither was relevant enough to change the overall noisy productivity of developers, than yeah. At least not positively.

beeflet 2y ago
modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows because they bundle the compiler and text editor and debugger together, and installing and configuring anything on windows is a pain of wizards and menus, especially if you want those programs to talk to each other correctly. I've had jobs where we have spent entire days configuring and installing visual studio and related software and activating all of the licenses and connecting all the databases. But on linux you can just can just figure it out once and "su install compiler-version text-editor-version debugger-version && cp dotfiles ~/.config"
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows Nah, the turn of the century IDEs were better enough that almost all the text editors adopted the relevant feature. We mostly do not have pure text editors like there were back then. There's nano, and notepad++, but on the traditional holdouts, vi became an IDE, and emacs, that was already an IDE turned into a multi-language one too. That said, those features were compelling enough for every editor to adopt, but didn't change the picture enough so that people had no choice but to use them. It is still perfectly viable to not use the IDE features of your favorite editor.