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Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

98 points by codeman001 1y ago

cjs_ac 1y ago
> The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance. It implies delegating not just tasks but judgment itself. Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant that phrase, but 'reflexive AI usage' has two conflicting meanings - it can be AI usage that is either actively or passively chosen - and we might need some better phrasing around this.
- Handprint4469 1y ago
  > we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. That is _reflective_ practice (which involves reflection). Reflexive otoh comes from 'reflex', which does suggest unthinking automaticity.
  - cjs_ac 1y ago
    No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; they are alternative forms of adjectives derived from the Latin verb flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum (note that both English spellings are present in the principal parts).
    - 1123581321 1y ago
      They both have multiple meanings in English. The article was using reflexive this way: “ characterized by habitual and unthinking behavior.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflexive https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflexive Is that fair to the word given its roots, no, but that is English for you. :)
      - cjs_ac 1y ago
        As bad as Merriam-Webster is, you might notice that 'characterised by habitual and unthinking behaviour' is the fourth, i.e., least common, definition offered, not the first.
        1123581321 1y ago
        Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) It’s not marked as an archaic so any of them are valid. Context tells the reader which is being used.
        cjs_ac 1y ago
        > Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :( > Context tells the reader which is being used. That's the thing: if you read the CEO's post on its own, with both meanings in mind, it's not clear (at least to me) which is intended.
        gorjusborg 1y ago
        Words and civil debate seeking truth are fun! The following behavior is not. > No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; ... > I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :(
        1123581321 1y ago
        Words are fun, especially etymology! And students do respond well to enthusiasm for them, or at least appreciate it later. Thank you for that. My wife also teaches English and a foreign language so that’s a part of our life. That said, how could you have read this and not understood the context for the definition used?! “The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance.” I thought it was fine to object that you liked the primary definition the most and had the strongest association with it.
        1y ago
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - fnordlord 1y ago
      Regardless of etymology, I believe the use of “reflexive” means something different in the article than “reflective.” The Shopify CEO isn’t describing insightful use of AI in coding. He is describing automatic, unthinking use of AI. At least, that it was my understanding.
    - rout39574 1y ago
      It's been a LONG time since my latin. But doesn't the active vs. passive capture the distinction we're talking about in English quite well? A reflexive action is taken passively, without thought. A reflective action is taken actively, with careful thought.
- bradly 1y ago
  > I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant I left Shopify a couple weeks ago and Tobi is very, very all-in on AI being an integral part of all jobs at Shopify. Tobi said that how you use AI is now an official part of your review, and that for any new recs, you need to show that the job can't be done by an ai. I left shortly after the memo so I do not know if things have changed. Shopify also brought in a very AI CTO a few months ago that internally has been... interesting to say the least. Also, anecdotally, the quality of code at Shopify was declining rapidly (leaderships words, not mine). All sorts of code-reds and yellows were happening to try and wrangle quality. This isn't Blind so no need for the gore and opinions, but we'll have to see how this shakes out for Shopify.
  - bwfan123 1y ago
    I thought ceos are more like coaches who motivate, and inspire. But not dictate employees on how they should execute. Since, engineers are expected to be far more capable than the ceo on their daily work (if not, the ceo needs to evaluate hiring practices). Tying ai-use to perf review and compensation is just more unnecessary process which incentivizes behaviors which may be counter-productive - "Oh, look, I am such a brilliant prompt-engineer" So, the memo seemed to baby-sit adult engineers. It goes without saying that engineers will use AI as they see fit, and the least a company would do is to make copilot subscriptions available for the staff if needed.
shinycode 1y ago
> If people stop the occasional deadlock of grinding teeth, looking at a problem, crying, going for a walk, praying and screaming until suddenly it makes sense (and you learn something!), I’d call it severe regression, not progress. People for which development is not their job will absolutely want to get rid of it as much as possible because it costs money. I really agree with the author, it does feel like a regression and it’s so easy to overlook what makes the most part of the job when it looks like it can be fully automated. Once you don’t have people who are used to do what’s quoted, and there is 500 million lines of code and bugs, good luck with that to ask a human to take a look. Maybe AI will be powerful enough to help debugging but it’s a dangerous endeavor to build critical business around that. If for any reason (political or else) AI got more expensive it could kill businesses (twitter api ?)
lm28469 1y ago
But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.
- porvertylk 1y ago
  I wish I could make six figures flipping burgers. Actually, why aren't most burger flippers applying for IT jobs?
  - lm28469 1y ago
    I wish I was making 100k as a dev, but plot twist outside of the US this is the minority. I was comparing burger flippers to michelin chefs, not to devs. The vast majority of devs are gluing tools together and working on basic CRUD stuff, which is the burger flipping of the tech world. It's just a job, people don't want to think about code in the shower, on walks, or "cry" about tech problems as the author seems to romanticise. A job is here to provide money so you can live life, not the other way around. If I can automate my burger flipping to go to the gym or read a book instead I'll gladly do it
    - Tade0 1y ago
      It helps to like your job though. I do some of the, ahem, "romanticised" things you mentioned because even in CRUD stuff there are hard problems to solve - particularly problems introduced by other people. We work to get paid, but you can't get around the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work that it is a part of life.
- bovermyer 1y ago
  There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about programming. Finally, you're holding up Michelin starred chefs as being inherently better than all other chefs. The Michelin star program is skewed towards one particular end result; to put it in technology terms, it's like grading your business solely on a narrow set of SLOs rather than a holistic understanding.
boredemployee 1y ago
"It’s about maintaining the human element in a craft that’s increasingly automated." I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late. didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years? Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almost volunteer work because the vast majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment, especially with AI flooding the music platforms, so I really expect it to happen to many other jobs.
- porvertylk 1y ago
  >majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment I wonder if music is the best example, because if I recall it has been always like this for musicians. Never have I heard that in my, my parents or grandparents time Musician was a career you would get in for money
  - svaha1728 1y ago
    When I was young I got to meet a lot of the aging jazz musicians of the 1930s in Kansas City. It absolutely was a career here. Granted, that’s a distant memory for most people.
- schaefer 1y ago
  There's a difference between having an opinion that a particular future is unavoidable, and choosing to live in that world before it even arrives. Not a single book on the NYT bestseller list is written by AI.
- shinycode 1y ago
  Going this route, what’s the point of of learning anything if everything is instantly accessible from an AI with working solutions ? So no learning = no teaching or teaching that feels useless. That’s a weird and dangerous road. Everyone should own this technology for the situation to be balanced, not private or country based. Because we make ourself kind of useless in the process we loose leverage and value and we are at the mercy of the powerful ones
TheChaplain 1y ago
I like the article. At the same time, as AI takes over the actual coding practice more and more, I find the situation with multiple programming languages a waste of resources. If AI could generate binaries, web assembly directly, or even some "AI specific bytecode" then we could skip the steps in the middle and save a ton of energy.
- bellBivDinesh 1y ago
  In this scenario are humans not making changes to existing code anymore?
- canes123456 1y ago
  So we just trust what AI says it does. What could go wrong, lol
strangescript 1y ago
Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"
- bobbyraduloff 1y ago
  This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.
  - strangescript 1y ago
    There is more complicated math systems that computers have solved, just like Chess, and Go. Systems that seemed impossible for a machine to beat and eventually they do. Coding will be exactly the same soon.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      Code is formal language, there’s nothing to be solved because it’s already as precise as 2*2. The issue is not with programming language, the issue is the domain where the problem is and the human that does translate the solution. Let’s take text rendering. We already have words on papers and various ways to get them there. But doing the same with computer is a difficult job because of all the parameters for drawing characters and laying them to form words and lines. Once you find those parameters, you have to account for future changes so you write you code in a way that minimize that impact. And because someone else will probably do maintenance, you try to come up with good abstractions so that your solution become understandable. If AI will solve coding, it may as well write machine code directly or be embedded as firmware, because every programming language was made for humans.
  - canes123456 1y ago
    You still need to do the decision making, design, architecture when using AI. AI is still more like a enthusiastic junior engineer. It will mindless start trying to solve a problem, copy in bad code, often makes mistakes, etc. You're still responsible for the hard problems and finding the issues. You are more of an senior/lead engineer who is doing as much thinking but not that much of the actual typing. The question in my mind is if you need to become less productive to keep your thinking skills sharp. Do we need to separate the work from the "gym". We have times when we are using AI heavily to be as productive as possible. Then we have other times where we don't use it all to keep us sharp. Is this necessary or are we being old fashion? I lean more towards this being necessary but if I grew up with AI, I might look at not using it as trying to write a web app in assembly. Yes, I learned it in college but there no reason to keep using it.
ericyd 1y ago
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
- rco8786 1y ago
  This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).
  - kevmo314 1y ago
    I do read the docs a lot less now though with IntelliSense, so if my craft were reading and understanding docs I'd probably be measurably disappointed by this future.
    - beej71 1y ago
      Aside: I can't stand popups when I'm coding. I always have to change it to something more manual or it just breaks up my flow. ^K to bring up a man page from vim is great--that's what I'm after.
      - PyWoody 1y ago
        There are dozens of us! I never understood how people could maintain focus while their cursor is jumping around and things are flying across the screen. I can type 90+ wpm, I don't need help typing.
  - mvieira38 1y ago
    Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems
extensityhn 1y ago
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bobbyraduloff 1y ago
Very good article. I try to (respectfully) push my coworkers in this direction but it’s a bit of a lost cause. I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors. People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.
juujian 1y ago
This reminds me that I should do more coding challenges. Maybe nothing major, small data wrangling. Stuff like puzzles in the game Human Resource Machine. Advent of code light maybe. So refreshing and fun sometimes.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
For me it’s not complicated when to use AI. If the task is something where having fluency will make me significantly more productive and nimble in the future, then I’ll go the old gym way. It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.
jstummbillig 1y ago
I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them. Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction. But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails. Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.
- noio 1y ago
  > thinking, contemplating and deadlock This is what I’d call ‘programming’. Which you’ll still be doing even if the AI is writing the code. The question is whether you can become good/better at programming without writing code?
lo_fye 1y ago
>>It won’t design your domain layer with the care and consideration that >>comes from deep experience and hard-won knowledge. What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.
- ath3nd 1y ago
  To me, knowledge is about knowing things, intelligence is about being able to apply your knowledge at the right context and for the right reasons. The current crop of LLMs has a lot of knowledge, but severely lacks on the "intelligence" part. Sure, it can "guess" how to write a unit test consistent with your codebase (based on examples), but for those 1% where you need to make a deviation from the rule, it's completely clueless how to do it properly. Guessing is not intelligence, although it might appear masked as such. Don't get me wrong, the "guessing" part is sometimes uncannily good, but it just can't replace real reasoning.
- DontchaKnowit 1y ago
  The problem is that someone elses aha might not apply to your situation. The AI cant reason and generalize like a human can to apply lessons from someone else to you slightly different situation
curtisszmania 1y ago
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2d8a875f-39a2-4 1y ago
"Generating boilerplate code, Summarizing documentation, Understanding complex concepts, Debugging tricky error messages, Drafting unit tests, Formatting data" Thing is, this is probably 99% of the programming work of a junior dev at a place where management thinks like that.
codr7 1y ago
Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me. Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction. Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill. Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there. Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp. Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain. Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead. Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...
- amoss 1y ago
  It reminds me of the Hamming quote: "I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important." Each of those little interruptions is a clue about the wider state of the world (codebase / APIs etc). AI offers a shortcut, but it does not provide the same mental world-building.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    That's a nice quote. And your comment reminds me of why I (and maybe some other people) prefer windows managers over desktop environments. You go with the basic and everytime you notice some missing capabilities or inefficiency, you code it away. The end result is something that fit you like a glove and you understand thoroughly. It's 100% your own. But with DE, you need maybe 80%, and the 20% you build with workarounds is constantly under threat. Why, because you're effectively enclosed in a small space by the design decisions of the DE.
- 1y ago
spacemadness 1y ago
My anxiety for where this is all going is as follows. Using AI for all your coding is a wet dream for CEOs because the goal is to fire all their engineering staff except for a handful of maintainers. However, it reminds me of trying to explain to your stakeholders why you need time to work on tech debt before it becomes a problem. There is no metric now that says there is a problem that’s easily measured but engineers are grinding their teeth trying to work within a system that is slowly degrading and is showing signs. “Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?” Likewise, the brainrot and lost knowledge, as well as possible new tech debt that fewer engineers working in their codebase understand, will eventually cause issues down the line. The same pressures will ensue causing stakeholders to ignore all the signs of degradation.
- skydhash 1y ago
  > “Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?” That's the reason I tried to have most of my communication (and complaints) in written and auditable form.
elia_42 1y ago
Really interesting and I agree with everything. With my team we always try to improve our programming skills without AI, even though we all recognize its great utility. Today every type of problem and every type of solution seems to have to be solved with AI, when there are more creative, original and artisanal ways to solve them (even if, sometimes, they need more time and patience)
o1o1o1 1y ago
This article really hit home—especially this part from the conclusion: > In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft. > ... > Like Rocky, we sometimes need to step away from the comfortable, civilized environment and return to the old gym – the place where real growth happens through struggle, persistence, and focused practice. > Because coding isn’t just about output. It’s about the journey of becoming better problem solvers, better thinkers, and better engineers. And some journeys can’t be outsourced, even to the most advanced AI. But here’s the reality: those ideals feel increasingly out of reach. Business demands and short-term thinking rarely leave room for “intentional” or “thoughtful” work. For many of us, having time to grow as engineers is a luxury. Worse, it’s often personal. I’ve had to carry the weight for friends in crisis, pretending two people were working just to help someone keep their job. It’s brutal—and sadly, not rare. As AI gets more buzz, many stakeholders now think our work is overvalued. A quick AI PoC becomes “good enough” in their eyes, and we’re expected to polish it into something real—fast, cheap, and under pressure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly defending our craft against the next threat of being replaced by “cheaper” labor. When I started out, we cared about clean code and craftsmanship. Now, I feel like I should be taking sales courses just to survive. Today, it’s all about output. Ship faster or get replaced. Quality only matters when it’s too late—after the person who made the bad call has already cashed out. I know this sounds pessimistic, but for many of us who aren’t in the top 1% of this industry, it’s just reality. Thanks for the article, Christian. You’re not wrong—but I think you’re one of the few lucky enough to live that perspective. I wish you all the best, and hope you can keep enjoying that rare luxury. There will be a need for true craftsmen—especially when the rest of us have gone numb just trying to keep up.

98 points by codeman001 1y ago

> The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance. It implies delegating not just tasks but judgment itself. Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant that phrase, but 'reflexive AI usage' has two conflicting meanings - it can be AI usage that is either actively or passively chosen - and we might need some better phrasing around this.

Handprint4469 1y ago
> we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. That is _reflective_ practice (which involves reflection). Reflexive otoh comes from 'reflex', which does suggest unthinking automaticity.
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; they are alternative forms of adjectives derived from the Latin verb flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum (note that both English spellings are present in the principal parts).
  - 1123581321 1y ago
    They both have multiple meanings in English. The article was using reflexive this way: “ characterized by habitual and unthinking behavior.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflexive https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflexive Is that fair to the word given its roots, no, but that is English for you. :)
    - cjs_ac 1y ago
      As bad as Merriam-Webster is, you might notice that 'characterised by habitual and unthinking behaviour' is the fourth, i.e., least common, definition offered, not the first.
      - 1123581321 1y ago
        Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) It’s not marked as an archaic so any of them are valid. Context tells the reader which is being used.
        cjs_ac 1y ago
        > Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :( > Context tells the reader which is being used. That's the thing: if you read the CEO's post on its own, with both meanings in mind, it's not clear (at least to me) which is intended.
        gorjusborg 1y ago
        Words and civil debate seeking truth are fun! The following behavior is not. > No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; ... > I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :(
        1123581321 1y ago
        Words are fun, especially etymology! And students do respond well to enthusiasm for them, or at least appreciate it later. Thank you for that. My wife also teaches English and a foreign language so that’s a part of our life. That said, how could you have read this and not understood the context for the definition used?! “The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance.” I thought it was fine to object that you liked the primary definition the most and had the strongest association with it.
      - 1y ago
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - fnordlord 1y ago
    Regardless of etymology, I believe the use of “reflexive” means something different in the article than “reflective.” The Shopify CEO isn’t describing insightful use of AI in coding. He is describing automatic, unthinking use of AI. At least, that it was my understanding.
  - rout39574 1y ago
    It's been a LONG time since my latin. But doesn't the active vs. passive capture the distinction we're talking about in English quite well? A reflexive action is taken passively, without thought. A reflective action is taken actively, with careful thought.
bradly 1y ago
> I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant I left Shopify a couple weeks ago and Tobi is very, very all-in on AI being an integral part of all jobs at Shopify. Tobi said that how you use AI is now an official part of your review, and that for any new recs, you need to show that the job can't be done by an ai. I left shortly after the memo so I do not know if things have changed. Shopify also brought in a very AI CTO a few months ago that internally has been... interesting to say the least. Also, anecdotally, the quality of code at Shopify was declining rapidly (leaderships words, not mine). All sorts of code-reds and yellows were happening to try and wrangle quality. This isn't Blind so no need for the gore and opinions, but we'll have to see how this shakes out for Shopify.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  I thought ceos are more like coaches who motivate, and inspire. But not dictate employees on how they should execute. Since, engineers are expected to be far more capable than the ceo on their daily work (if not, the ceo needs to evaluate hiring practices). Tying ai-use to perf review and compensation is just more unnecessary process which incentivizes behaviors which may be counter-productive - "Oh, look, I am such a brilliant prompt-engineer" So, the memo seemed to baby-sit adult engineers. It goes without saying that engineers will use AI as they see fit, and the least a company would do is to make copilot subscriptions available for the staff if needed.

shinycode 1y ago

> If people stop the occasional deadlock of grinding teeth, looking at a problem, crying, going for a walk, praying and screaming until suddenly it makes sense (and you learn something!), I’d call it severe regression, not progress. People for which development is not their job will absolutely want to get rid of it as much as possible because it costs money. I really agree with the author, it does feel like a regression and it’s so easy to overlook what makes the most part of the job when it looks like it can be fully automated. Once you don’t have people who are used to do what’s quoted, and there is 500 million lines of code and bugs, good luck with that to ask a human to take a look. Maybe AI will be powerful enough to help debugging but it’s a dangerous endeavor to build critical business around that. If for any reason (political or else) AI got more expensive it could kill businesses (twitter api ?)

lm28469 1y ago

But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.

porvertylk 1y ago
I wish I could make six figures flipping burgers. Actually, why aren't most burger flippers applying for IT jobs?
- lm28469 1y ago
  I wish I was making 100k as a dev, but plot twist outside of the US this is the minority. I was comparing burger flippers to michelin chefs, not to devs. The vast majority of devs are gluing tools together and working on basic CRUD stuff, which is the burger flipping of the tech world. It's just a job, people don't want to think about code in the shower, on walks, or "cry" about tech problems as the author seems to romanticise. A job is here to provide money so you can live life, not the other way around. If I can automate my burger flipping to go to the gym or read a book instead I'll gladly do it
  - Tade0 1y ago
    It helps to like your job though. I do some of the, ahem, "romanticised" things you mentioned because even in CRUD stuff there are hard problems to solve - particularly problems introduced by other people. We work to get paid, but you can't get around the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work that it is a part of life.
bovermyer 1y ago
There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about programming. Finally, you're holding up Michelin starred chefs as being inherently better than all other chefs. The Michelin star program is skewed towards one particular end result; to put it in technology terms, it's like grading your business solely on a narrow set of SLOs rather than a holistic understanding.

boredemployee 1y ago

"It’s about maintaining the human element in a craft that’s increasingly automated." I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late. didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years? Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almost volunteer work because the vast majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment, especially with AI flooding the music platforms, so I really expect it to happen to many other jobs.

porvertylk 1y ago
>majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment I wonder if music is the best example, because if I recall it has been always like this for musicians. Never have I heard that in my, my parents or grandparents time Musician was a career you would get in for money
- svaha1728 1y ago
  When I was young I got to meet a lot of the aging jazz musicians of the 1930s in Kansas City. It absolutely was a career here. Granted, that’s a distant memory for most people.
schaefer 1y ago
There's a difference between having an opinion that a particular future is unavoidable, and choosing to live in that world before it even arrives. Not a single book on the NYT bestseller list is written by AI.
shinycode 1y ago
Going this route, what’s the point of of learning anything if everything is instantly accessible from an AI with working solutions ? So no learning = no teaching or teaching that feels useless. That’s a weird and dangerous road. Everyone should own this technology for the situation to be balanced, not private or country based. Because we make ourself kind of useless in the process we loose leverage and value and we are at the mercy of the powerful ones

TheChaplain 1y ago

I like the article. At the same time, as AI takes over the actual coding practice more and more, I find the situation with multiple programming languages a waste of resources. If AI could generate binaries, web assembly directly, or even some "AI specific bytecode" then we could skip the steps in the middle and save a ton of energy.

bellBivDinesh 1y ago
In this scenario are humans not making changes to existing code anymore?
canes123456 1y ago
So we just trust what AI says it does. What could go wrong, lol

strangescript 1y ago

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

bobbyraduloff 1y ago
This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.
- strangescript 1y ago
  There is more complicated math systems that computers have solved, just like Chess, and Go. Systems that seemed impossible for a machine to beat and eventually they do. Coding will be exactly the same soon.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Code is formal language, there’s nothing to be solved because it’s already as precise as 2*2. The issue is not with programming language, the issue is the domain where the problem is and the human that does translate the solution. Let’s take text rendering. We already have words on papers and various ways to get them there. But doing the same with computer is a difficult job because of all the parameters for drawing characters and laying them to form words and lines. Once you find those parameters, you have to account for future changes so you write you code in a way that minimize that impact. And because someone else will probably do maintenance, you try to come up with good abstractions so that your solution become understandable. If AI will solve coding, it may as well write machine code directly or be embedded as firmware, because every programming language was made for humans.
- canes123456 1y ago
  You still need to do the decision making, design, architecture when using AI. AI is still more like a enthusiastic junior engineer. It will mindless start trying to solve a problem, copy in bad code, often makes mistakes, etc. You're still responsible for the hard problems and finding the issues. You are more of an senior/lead engineer who is doing as much thinking but not that much of the actual typing. The question in my mind is if you need to become less productive to keep your thinking skills sharp. Do we need to separate the work from the "gym". We have times when we are using AI heavily to be as productive as possible. Then we have other times where we don't use it all to keep us sharp. Is this necessary or are we being old fashion? I lean more towards this being necessary but if I grew up with AI, I might look at not using it as trying to write a web app in assembly. Yes, I learned it in college but there no reason to keep using it.

ericyd 1y ago

I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.

rco8786 1y ago
This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).
- kevmo314 1y ago
  I do read the docs a lot less now though with IntelliSense, so if my craft were reading and understanding docs I'd probably be measurably disappointed by this future.
  - beej71 1y ago
    Aside: I can't stand popups when I'm coding. I always have to change it to something more manual or it just breaks up my flow. ^K to bring up a man page from vim is great--that's what I'm after.
    - PyWoody 1y ago
      There are dozens of us! I never understood how people could maintain focus while their cursor is jumping around and things are flying across the screen. I can type 90+ wpm, I don't need help typing.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems

extensityhn 1y ago

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bobbyraduloff 1y ago

Very good article. I try to (respectfully) push my coworkers in this direction but it’s a bit of a lost cause. I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors. People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.

juujian 1y ago

This reminds me that I should do more coding challenges. Maybe nothing major, small data wrangling. Stuff like puzzles in the game Human Resource Machine. Advent of code light maybe. So refreshing and fun sometimes.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

For me it’s not complicated when to use AI. If the task is something where having fluency will make me significantly more productive and nimble in the future, then I’ll go the old gym way. It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.

jstummbillig 1y ago

I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them. Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction. But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails. Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.

noio 1y ago
> thinking, contemplating and deadlock This is what I’d call ‘programming’. Which you’ll still be doing even if the AI is writing the code. The question is whether you can become good/better at programming without writing code?

lo_fye 1y ago

>>It won’t design your domain layer with the care and consideration that >>comes from deep experience and hard-won knowledge. What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.

ath3nd 1y ago
To me, knowledge is about knowing things, intelligence is about being able to apply your knowledge at the right context and for the right reasons. The current crop of LLMs has a lot of knowledge, but severely lacks on the "intelligence" part. Sure, it can "guess" how to write a unit test consistent with your codebase (based on examples), but for those 1% where you need to make a deviation from the rule, it's completely clueless how to do it properly. Guessing is not intelligence, although it might appear masked as such. Don't get me wrong, the "guessing" part is sometimes uncannily good, but it just can't replace real reasoning.
DontchaKnowit 1y ago
The problem is that someone elses aha might not apply to your situation. The AI cant reason and generalize like a human can to apply lessons from someone else to you slightly different situation

curtisszmania 1y ago

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2d8a875f-39a2-4 1y ago

"Generating boilerplate code, Summarizing documentation, Understanding complex concepts, Debugging tricky error messages, Drafting unit tests, Formatting data" Thing is, this is probably 99% of the programming work of a junior dev at a place where management thinks like that.

codr7 1y ago

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me. Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction. Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill. Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there. Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp. Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain. Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead. Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...

amoss 1y ago
It reminds me of the Hamming quote: "I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important." Each of those little interruptions is a clue about the wider state of the world (codebase / APIs etc). AI offers a shortcut, but it does not provide the same mental world-building.
- skydhash 1y ago
  That's a nice quote. And your comment reminds me of why I (and maybe some other people) prefer windows managers over desktop environments. You go with the basic and everytime you notice some missing capabilities or inefficiency, you code it away. The end result is something that fit you like a glove and you understand thoroughly. It's 100% your own. But with DE, you need maybe 80%, and the 20% you build with workarounds is constantly under threat. Why, because you're effectively enclosed in a small space by the design decisions of the DE.
1y ago

spacemadness 1y ago

My anxiety for where this is all going is as follows. Using AI for all your coding is a wet dream for CEOs because the goal is to fire all their engineering staff except for a handful of maintainers. However, it reminds me of trying to explain to your stakeholders why you need time to work on tech debt before it becomes a problem. There is no metric now that says there is a problem that’s easily measured but engineers are grinding their teeth trying to work within a system that is slowly degrading and is showing signs. “Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?” Likewise, the brainrot and lost knowledge, as well as possible new tech debt that fewer engineers working in their codebase understand, will eventually cause issues down the line. The same pressures will ensue causing stakeholders to ignore all the signs of degradation.

skydhash 1y ago
> “Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?” That's the reason I tried to have most of my communication (and complaints) in written and auditable form.

elia_42 1y ago

Really interesting and I agree with everything. With my team we always try to improve our programming skills without AI, even though we all recognize its great utility. Today every type of problem and every type of solution seems to have to be solved with AI, when there are more creative, original and artisanal ways to solve them (even if, sometimes, they need more time and patience)

o1o1o1 1y ago

This article really hit home—especially this part from the conclusion: > In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft. > ... > Like Rocky, we sometimes need to step away from the comfortable, civilized environment and return to the old gym – the place where real growth happens through struggle, persistence, and focused practice. > Because coding isn’t just about output. It’s about the journey of becoming better problem solvers, better thinkers, and better engineers. And some journeys can’t be outsourced, even to the most advanced AI. But here’s the reality: those ideals feel increasingly out of reach. Business demands and short-term thinking rarely leave room for “intentional” or “thoughtful” work. For many of us, having time to grow as engineers is a luxury. Worse, it’s often personal. I’ve had to carry the weight for friends in crisis, pretending two people were working just to help someone keep their job. It’s brutal—and sadly, not rare. As AI gets more buzz, many stakeholders now think our work is overvalued. A quick AI PoC becomes “good enough” in their eyes, and we’re expected to polish it into something real—fast, cheap, and under pressure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly defending our craft against the next threat of being replaced by “cheaper” labor. When I started out, we cared about clean code and craftsmanship. Now, I feel like I should be taking sales courses just to survive. Today, it’s all about output. Ship faster or get replaced. Quality only matters when it’s too late—after the person who made the bad call has already cashed out. I know this sounds pessimistic, but for many of us who aren’t in the top 1% of this industry, it’s just reality. Thanks for the article, Christian. You’re not wrong—but I think you’re one of the few lucky enough to live that perspective. I wish you all the best, and hope you can keep enjoying that rare luxury. There will be a need for true craftsmen—especially when the rest of us have gone numb just trying to keep up.