6 ms·

> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learnin

> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.

caseyf 7mo ago
+1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend all day talking to as if it were a human
- someprick 7mo ago
  Lurked for >10y here. Created an account just to say, "+1 well said."
rjh29 7mo ago
The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.
- swader999 7mo ago
  Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.
  - DennisP 7mo ago
    Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.
    - gedy 7mo ago
      Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of following through a logical product, even if they start using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier. The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.
      - DennisP 7mo ago
        There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable of delivering products, who have ideas that are too ambitious to do on their own.
        gedy 7mo ago
        Agreed, that's not really who I was referring too.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.
      - DennisP 7mo ago
        For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that they never could have done otherwise.
      - steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
        Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.
  - beepbooptheory 7mo ago
    Yall's blood-diamond-ass mommy bots are going to replace bullshit with bullshit and call it a win. The last datacenter will run out of coal and water and we'll be asking: "but how in the world am I going to make this Todo app?"
- crocodile10203 7mo ago
  "bvilders" right now its mostly people who want to build a substandard app and shill it everywhere.
  - rjh29 7mo ago
    That's what's visible now. Give it more time and larger, more long-term projects will come out. I'm talking about people with ambitious ideas who -could- code but lack the time or energy.
- ori_b 7mo ago
  Doordash has also enabled home cooks; they no longer have to worry about smashing together ingredients by hand to make dinner. They just prompt the app to make them the food they want. Doordash is the future of home cooking.
  - rjh29 7mo ago
    Prepackaged pasta sauces and cake mix. Worse than making it from scratch but enables people with no time to cook more dishes. Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.
    - ori_b 7mo ago
      I suggest you stop paying Anthropic, and see how much code gets written. You're absolutely paying someone else to do it for you.
      - rjh29 7mo ago
        I pay Google £15/month and have never hit the usage limit. But thanks anyway. edit: I think you might mean vibe coding (and those infamous things that use millions of tokens with no limit) but for programmers using LLMs to code is literally just a tool like anything else and the cost is barely relevant. It's not comparable to contracting out code, and it's not even comparable to eating out in terms of cost!
  - ricardorivaldo 7mo ago
    There are much nore than 2 types of programers, one you forgot are the ones who just need the job and any tool that helps is welcome, also, there the ones that don't care for anything and does programming just because is the only thing that's available to jot work on sales or burger flipping, and the list goes on
- falkensmaize 7mo ago
  Thinking carefully about the details of implementation MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something “built” fast isn’t and should not be the only consideration. I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.
  - rjh29 7mo ago
    I agree. However manual code review and heavy refactoring is a laborious and error prone process, and even most human projects don't keep up with it successfully. Plenty of horrible code debt ridden projects in the real world. As long as you're not writing safety-critical code, use of LLM is not incompatible with what you're saying.
  - ricardorivaldo 7mo ago
    For now it matters, but how long ? Context window will keep increasing and soon ai will be able to take care of all our codebase
- ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
  Imagine if your operating system or compiler were written by the sort of person that thinks "Coders who love the art of programming ... are in for a rough time."
  - rjh29 7mo ago
    Yeah but 99% of jobs are decidedly not that.
GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
Why not, normies love to talk with the computer.
- rikroots 7mo ago
  Well I do seem to spent a fair amount of my developer time swearing at my laptop screen. And then there's that time I spend just prior to writing code just staring at the wall while I figure out what sort of code I want to write - if I can repackage that wall-staring time into "time spent consulting with AI about approaches and architecture decisions" I'm sure my engineering manager will think more kindly of me ...
  - GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
    I'm puzzled why they don't speak aloud. Isn't it more natural AI interface? How difficult it is to connect a microphone to speech to text engine and connect that to AI? And then speak aloud. Your manager will be happy to hear you work.
    - throwaway27448 7mo ago
      It's easier to fake humanity through toneless text with narrow context and low expectstions, I think. A chatbot you type to is of course going to impress easier
IanCal 7mo ago
To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses. I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard. Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  > Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking... You know. Chores. Not my software, I actually enjoy building that
  - apsurd 7mo ago
    interesting comparison to cooking. cooking is a chore and takes effort and people enjoy cooking.
    - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      Eating is also not really optional If you're going to spend a pretty good chunk of your lifetime eating, you might as well get good at it so you can enjoy the food you make
      - IanCal 7mo ago
        Do you want to eat good food or make good food? Is doing the dishes something you hand to a machine or do you always do it by hand? Are there any ingredients you buy pre-made (pesto, curry pastes, do you make your own panko breadcrumbs)?
        apsurd 7mo ago
AUF2026 7mo ago
[dead]
crocodile10203 7mo ago
I mean if > 30% of my work is drudgery, I have failed already.
arcxi 7mo ago
amidst this whole AI craze it's illuminating to learn how many programmers secretly hated programming all along
- sph 7mo ago
  It’s clear at this point that the term programmer was used to refer to two very different types of people.
- doug_durham 7mo ago
  I don't know if it's "hate" rather than "a means to an ends". I love learning new languages, and coding. But it was always a means to an ends. The dopamine hit always came from seeing the project compile and do something.
  - m0llusk 7mo ago
    There are multiple ends in conflict. Code skillfully constructed using abstractions that fit well to the problem space can be extended, maintained, and refactored as necessary to serve customers and markets from high to low level over long periods of time with all the social and industrial change that comes with that. Simply putting in place mechanisms that deliver what is needed now end up unintentionally cutting off future variants, alternative uses, longevity, and robustness all to minimize perceived costs. And it isn't so much that one approach may be better than another. That is going to depend on context and available resources and more. What we are seeing is the short term being served to the absolute exclusion of thought about the longer term. Maybe if that goes fast and well enough then it will be sufficient, but churning out code bases that endure is a challenge that is only starting to be tested.
  - polishdude20 7mo ago
    Yeah and especially the satisfaction that you were able to make a user delighted to use your thing. Fixing bugs, making things faster, adding new features, for me personally I do it because I feels really good when a customer loves to use the thing I've built. Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.
barnabee 7mo ago
I like designing data, algorithms, and systems. I like picking the right tools for the job. I like making architectural and user interface (CLI, configuration format, GUI, whatever) decisions. Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making things. So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm making more software (and hardware) than ever, mostly just to scratch an itch. Those people that really love it should be fine. Hobbies aren't supposed to make you money anyway. I don't have much interest in maintaining the existence of software development/engineering (or anything else) as a profession if it turns out it's not necessary. Not that I think that's really what's happening. Software engineering will continue as a profession. Many developers have been doing barely useful glue work (often as a result of bad/overcomplicated abstractions and tooling in the first place, IMO) and perhaps that won't be needed, but plenty more engineers will continue to design and build things just more effectively and with better tools.
- staplers 7mo ago
  The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public. Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.
  - Ygg2 7mo ago
    > The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.
    - dmd 7mo ago
      I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.
GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
You can always code by hand as a hobby. If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thinking. I don’t think many of us spend time, wondering if the welder enjoys the torch or if a cheaper shop weld is robbing the human welder of the satisfaction of a field weld. And we don’t shed so much ink wondering if digital spreadsheets are a moral good or not because perhaps they robbed the accountant of the satisfaction of holding a beautiful quill in hand dipped expertly in carefully selected ink. You’re lucky if you enjoy your job, I think most of us find a way to learn to enjoy our work or at least tolerate it. I just wish all the moaning would end. Code generation is not new, and that the state of the art is now as good at translating high-level instructions into a program at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers is a huge win for humanity. Work that could be trivially automated, but is not only because of the scarcity of programming knowledge is going to start disappearing. I think the value creation is going to be tremendous and I think it will take years for it to penetrate existing workflows and for us to recognize the value.
- notpachet 7mo ago
  > at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers I don't think this is the flex you think it is... in my experience, the bottom 10% of programmers are actively harmful and should never be allowed near your codebase.
  - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
    Quite a few people think that about Claude code. I disagree with them, personally, but I think we can agree that AI code generation is qualitatively at least as good as the worst human professionals. I think we would also probably agree that the state of the art today is not as good as the very best. The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I would say that state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output.
RobRivera 7mo ago
Yea! Back to my amazing Pax Americana of friendly neighbors, high trust in my authorities, and cheerful joyous days in oeace and harmony with my fellow man, complete with gum drop smiles and firm faith in my institutions. A truly brave new world
InfamousRece 7mo ago
I’d love to outsource all the boring, tedious parts of my job to LLM. Unfortunately it is the upper management who decide which parts of my job are boring.
chocolatemario 7mo ago
It’s hard for me to believe that, unless you’re just doing simple glue work or you’re working in a low stakes environments, anyone is just delegating everything to agents. If you’re working on a migration (common in enterprise infrastructure work), you’re familiar with the needless abstractions, and it’s something you’ve done many times over; agents can certainly expedite change. If you’re building anything with depth and you do not have a clear understanding of the underpinning logic, you’re either very gifted in your ability to reason about abstractions or you’re setting yourself for a failure at some point in the future. You need expertise at some point. Programming/debugging as a means of learning a domain is akin to writing as a means of clarifying your thoughts. That being said, yea enterprise coding can be extremely mundane and it’s setup for learning it deeply then finding a way to do it faster. I’m likely in the 90% range of my work being done by Claude, but I’m working in a domain I’ve got years of experience with hand coding and stepping through code in my debugger. I think this latter piece is the challenge I’m struggling with. There is an endless amount of work that can be done at my company but as long as the economy is in a weird spot, I’m being led to believe that ai is making me expendable. This is a consequence of the fact that glue work represents 80% of my output (not value). The other 20% of time at work is exploring ideas without guaranteed results, its aligning stakeholders, its testing feasibility with mvps or experts from another area I need some help with. If glue work represents tangible output and conceptual work is something that may not actually have value my manager wants me to explore it, I’m just a glue guy in enterprise while I’m left chasing the dragon of a cool project for me to really sink my teeth into. That project is just a half baked bad idea from someone disconnected with reality. Glue work is measurable in LoC (however useless a metric it is measurable) and it’s certainly paying the bills.

caseyf 7mo ago

+1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend all day talking to as if it were a human

someprick 7mo ago
Lurked for >10y here. Created an account just to say, "+1 well said."

rjh29 7mo ago

The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.

swader999 7mo ago
Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.
- DennisP 7mo ago
  Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.
  - gedy 7mo ago
    Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of following through a logical product, even if they start using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier. The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.
    - DennisP 7mo ago
      There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable of delivering products, who have ideas that are too ambitious to do on their own.
      - gedy 7mo ago
        Agreed, that's not really who I was referring too.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.
    - DennisP 7mo ago
      For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that they never could have done otherwise.
    - steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
      Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  Yall's blood-diamond-ass mommy bots are going to replace bullshit with bullshit and call it a win. The last datacenter will run out of coal and water and we'll be asking: "but how in the world am I going to make this Todo app?"
crocodile10203 7mo ago
"bvilders" right now its mostly people who want to build a substandard app and shill it everywhere.
- rjh29 7mo ago
  That's what's visible now. Give it more time and larger, more long-term projects will come out. I'm talking about people with ambitious ideas who -could- code but lack the time or energy.
ori_b 7mo ago
Doordash has also enabled home cooks; they no longer have to worry about smashing together ingredients by hand to make dinner. They just prompt the app to make them the food they want. Doordash is the future of home cooking.
- rjh29 7mo ago
  Prepackaged pasta sauces and cake mix. Worse than making it from scratch but enables people with no time to cook more dishes. Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.
  - ori_b 7mo ago
    I suggest you stop paying Anthropic, and see how much code gets written. You're absolutely paying someone else to do it for you.
    - rjh29 7mo ago
      I pay Google £15/month and have never hit the usage limit. But thanks anyway. edit: I think you might mean vibe coding (and those infamous things that use millions of tokens with no limit) but for programmers using LLMs to code is literally just a tool like anything else and the cost is barely relevant. It's not comparable to contracting out code, and it's not even comparable to eating out in terms of cost!
- ricardorivaldo 7mo ago
  There are much nore than 2 types of programers, one you forgot are the ones who just need the job and any tool that helps is welcome, also, there the ones that don't care for anything and does programming just because is the only thing that's available to jot work on sales or burger flipping, and the list goes on
falkensmaize 7mo ago
Thinking carefully about the details of implementation MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something “built” fast isn’t and should not be the only consideration. I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.
- rjh29 7mo ago
  I agree. However manual code review and heavy refactoring is a laborious and error prone process, and even most human projects don't keep up with it successfully. Plenty of horrible code debt ridden projects in the real world. As long as you're not writing safety-critical code, use of LLM is not incompatible with what you're saying.
- ricardorivaldo 7mo ago
  For now it matters, but how long ? Context window will keep increasing and soon ai will be able to take care of all our codebase
ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
Imagine if your operating system or compiler were written by the sort of person that thinks "Coders who love the art of programming ... are in for a rough time."
- rjh29 7mo ago
  Yeah but 99% of jobs are decidedly not that.

GoblinSlayer 7mo ago

Why not, normies love to talk with the computer.

rikroots 7mo ago
Well I do seem to spent a fair amount of my developer time swearing at my laptop screen. And then there's that time I spend just prior to writing code just staring at the wall while I figure out what sort of code I want to write - if I can repackage that wall-staring time into "time spent consulting with AI about approaches and architecture decisions" I'm sure my engineering manager will think more kindly of me ...
- GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
  I'm puzzled why they don't speak aloud. Isn't it more natural AI interface? How difficult it is to connect a microphone to speech to text engine and connect that to AI? And then speak aloud. Your manager will be happy to hear you work.
  - throwaway27448 7mo ago
    It's easier to fake humanity through toneless text with narrow context and low expectstions, I think. A chatbot you type to is of course going to impress easier

IanCal 7mo ago

To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses. I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard. Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking... You know. Chores. Not my software, I actually enjoy building that
- apsurd 7mo ago
  interesting comparison to cooking. cooking is a chore and takes effort and people enjoy cooking.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    Eating is also not really optional If you're going to spend a pretty good chunk of your lifetime eating, you might as well get good at it so you can enjoy the food you make
    - IanCal 7mo ago
      Do you want to eat good food or make good food? Is doing the dishes something you hand to a machine or do you always do it by hand? Are there any ingredients you buy pre-made (pesto, curry pastes, do you make your own panko breadcrumbs)?
      - apsurd 7mo ago

AUF2026 7mo ago

[dead]

crocodile10203 7mo ago

I mean if > 30% of my work is drudgery, I have failed already.

arcxi 7mo ago

amidst this whole AI craze it's illuminating to learn how many programmers secretly hated programming all along

sph 7mo ago
It’s clear at this point that the term programmer was used to refer to two very different types of people.
doug_durham 7mo ago
I don't know if it's "hate" rather than "a means to an ends". I love learning new languages, and coding. But it was always a means to an ends. The dopamine hit always came from seeing the project compile and do something.
- m0llusk 7mo ago
  There are multiple ends in conflict. Code skillfully constructed using abstractions that fit well to the problem space can be extended, maintained, and refactored as necessary to serve customers and markets from high to low level over long periods of time with all the social and industrial change that comes with that. Simply putting in place mechanisms that deliver what is needed now end up unintentionally cutting off future variants, alternative uses, longevity, and robustness all to minimize perceived costs. And it isn't so much that one approach may be better than another. That is going to depend on context and available resources and more. What we are seeing is the short term being served to the absolute exclusion of thought about the longer term. Maybe if that goes fast and well enough then it will be sufficient, but churning out code bases that endure is a challenge that is only starting to be tested.
- polishdude20 7mo ago
  Yeah and especially the satisfaction that you were able to make a user delighted to use your thing. Fixing bugs, making things faster, adding new features, for me personally I do it because I feels really good when a customer loves to use the thing I've built. Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.

barnabee 7mo ago

I like designing data, algorithms, and systems. I like picking the right tools for the job. I like making architectural and user interface (CLI, configuration format, GUI, whatever) decisions. Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making things. So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm making more software (and hardware) than ever, mostly just to scratch an itch. Those people that really love it should be fine. Hobbies aren't supposed to make you money anyway. I don't have much interest in maintaining the existence of software development/engineering (or anything else) as a profession if it turns out it's not necessary. Not that I think that's really what's happening. Software engineering will continue as a profession. Many developers have been doing barely useful glue work (often as a result of bad/overcomplicated abstractions and tooling in the first place, IMO) and perhaps that won't be needed, but plenty more engineers will continue to design and build things just more effectively and with better tools.

staplers 7mo ago
The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public. Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.
- Ygg2 7mo ago
  > The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.
  - dmd 7mo ago
    I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.

GorbachevyChase 7mo ago

You can always code by hand as a hobby. If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thinking. I don’t think many of us spend time, wondering if the welder enjoys the torch or if a cheaper shop weld is robbing the human welder of the satisfaction of a field weld. And we don’t shed so much ink wondering if digital spreadsheets are a moral good or not because perhaps they robbed the accountant of the satisfaction of holding a beautiful quill in hand dipped expertly in carefully selected ink. You’re lucky if you enjoy your job, I think most of us find a way to learn to enjoy our work or at least tolerate it. I just wish all the moaning would end. Code generation is not new, and that the state of the art is now as good at translating high-level instructions into a program at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers is a huge win for humanity. Work that could be trivially automated, but is not only because of the scarcity of programming knowledge is going to start disappearing. I think the value creation is going to be tremendous and I think it will take years for it to penetrate existing workflows and for us to recognize the value.

notpachet 7mo ago
> at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers I don't think this is the flex you think it is... in my experience, the bottom 10% of programmers are actively harmful and should never be allowed near your codebase.
- GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
  Quite a few people think that about Claude code. I disagree with them, personally, but I think we can agree that AI code generation is qualitatively at least as good as the worst human professionals. I think we would also probably agree that the state of the art today is not as good as the very best. The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I would say that state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output.

RobRivera 7mo ago

Yea! Back to my amazing Pax Americana of friendly neighbors, high trust in my authorities, and cheerful joyous days in oeace and harmony with my fellow man, complete with gum drop smiles and firm faith in my institutions. A truly brave new world

InfamousRece 7mo ago

I’d love to outsource all the boring, tedious parts of my job to LLM. Unfortunately it is the upper management who decide which parts of my job are boring.

chocolatemario 7mo ago

It’s hard for me to believe that, unless you’re just doing simple glue work or you’re working in a low stakes environments, anyone is just delegating everything to agents. If you’re working on a migration (common in enterprise infrastructure work), you’re familiar with the needless abstractions, and it’s something you’ve done many times over; agents can certainly expedite change. If you’re building anything with depth and you do not have a clear understanding of the underpinning logic, you’re either very gifted in your ability to reason about abstractions or you’re setting yourself for a failure at some point in the future. You need expertise at some point. Programming/debugging as a means of learning a domain is akin to writing as a means of clarifying your thoughts. That being said, yea enterprise coding can be extremely mundane and it’s setup for learning it deeply then finding a way to do it faster. I’m likely in the 90% range of my work being done by Claude, but I’m working in a domain I’ve got years of experience with hand coding and stepping through code in my debugger. I think this latter piece is the challenge I’m struggling with. There is an endless amount of work that can be done at my company but as long as the economy is in a weird spot, I’m being led to believe that ai is making me expendable. This is a consequence of the fact that glue work represents 80% of my output (not value). The other 20% of time at work is exploring ideas without guaranteed results, its aligning stakeholders, its testing feasibility with mvps or experts from another area I need some help with. If glue work represents tangible output and conceptual work is something that may not actually have value my manager wants me to explore it, I’m just a glue guy in enterprise while I’m left chasing the dragon of a cool project for me to really sink my teeth into. That project is just a half baked bad idea from someone disconnected with reality. Glue work is measurable in LoC (however useless a metric it is measurable) and it’s certainly paying the bills.