4 ms·

At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are rele

by sph 2mo ago

At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.

paxys 2mo ago
I used to be that person, and suddenly I haven’t opened an editor or written a line of code by hand in 6+ months.
- cavem0nkey 2mo ago
  Same here. All I do now is spend all day on calls with people whose shit exploded and I'm trying to scrub it off the walls, ceiling and the customers.
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    All money is green. Ensure you are being compensated sufficiently for your time.
    - cavem0nkey 2mo ago
      Yes. No money no work.
    - dmd 2mo ago
      Most of the world’s money is not, in fact, green.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
  - baal80spam 2mo ago
    Ah, so then you became a plumber!
    - cavem0nkey 2mo ago
      Sewage worker
- sph 2mo ago
  But why? I like writing code. Why in the world would I want to become someone that doesn't write code?
  - paxys 2mo ago
    The person paying you doesn’t care about your enjoyment.
    - sph 2mo ago
      I do care about my enjoyment. Or should my existence, wants and dreams solely be defined by my current employer? Are yours?
      - tuesdaynight 2mo ago
        I don't understand what you want to hear. You can still code manually all you want, but people will not pay you for doing that in the near future. You can still do it for your personal projects.
        greazy 2mo ago
        You're right, they won't be paying me to write code in the near future... They will be paying me to fix code. Good times ahead!
        vips7L 2mo ago
        Yes they will.
        bravetraveler 2mo ago
        > I don't understand what you want to hear ... in the near future. Interjecting, here. Perhaps not an academic repeat of five years ago; is this an eon for Technology or not long enough? I've lost track. Anyway, I appreciate the optimism. An anecdote, from the ground floor: this industry has shown it's paying leagues of on-site hands to install systems, at scale, from USB keys. PXE products have existed for decades; we're writing one [to adopt] when we could take one off the shelf. These artisanal OS installations are too rich for my blood. Or, they would be, if this modernization didn't happen to be the code I'm still writing by hand. Half a decade in (or several) depending on perspective. I'll believe things are progressing as you say... when this type of mismanagement stops happening like clockwork. Want more chatbots/datacenters? Catch up to the mid-1980s; BOOTP 'just' dropped.
tayo42 2mo ago
I feel like theres so much churn and change there's no point in trying to keep up.
- lbreakjai 2mo ago
  Remember six months ago when linkedin people were adamant you needed to keep on top of everything not to get "left behind"? Agents, skills, mcps, swarms ... If anything, my setup has gotten ever so simpler as models got better.
  - sph 2mo ago
    Why go on Linkedin? The "don't get left behind" people are all in this comment section.
  - vips7L 2mo ago
    Can’t get left behind by people who can’t write a crud endpoint or an email by themselves.
skywhopper 2mo ago
That’s fine, and you’re doing fine. In fact, in a few years you will probably be far more skilled than most “software engineers”.
- adamtaylor_13 2mo ago
  Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct). Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI? I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer. Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.) All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!) It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
  - miyoji 2mo ago
    > Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Either you work in a non-standard field, or your standards for software are way too low. What software gets to fail 80% of the time? If your ecommerce checkout software fails 1 in 5 times, you don't have an ecommerce business at all, you are dead in the water. If your airline booking software fails for 1 in 5 customers, you are out of business. 99.99% reliability still means 1 in 10000 customers are experiencing an error, which at scale can mean thousands to millions per day. That's completely unacceptable for any software I've ever been involved with writing.
avgDev 2mo ago
I open my editor, I need to implement a feature, I tell chatGPT what I need, it reviews my code and provides suggestions. I then tell it to implement it. I then tell it to write tests. I review the code. I test it. I have another AI do code review. I push it to test, then after tests to production. For some common tasks, that I don't find interesting it is great. I do a lot of CRUD, I honestly cannot imagine writing these apps without AI. It made curious and freed my brain to think about other things. I am now playing with hardware and plan on launching a niche product. This would not be possible if I 100% committed to programming without AI.
catfood 2mo ago
Letting it rip and give it full infra, db, dns, all the keys to the castle, drinking from a telemetry firehose the whole time, a huge tangled web of integrations that all kind of works. I think just offloading as much as possible is the state of things.

by sph 2mo ago

paxys 2mo ago

I used to be that person, and suddenly I haven’t opened an editor or written a line of code by hand in 6+ months.

cavem0nkey 2mo ago
Same here. All I do now is spend all day on calls with people whose shit exploded and I'm trying to scrub it off the walls, ceiling and the customers.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  All money is green. Ensure you are being compensated sufficiently for your time.
  - cavem0nkey 2mo ago
    Yes. No money no work.
  - dmd 2mo ago
    Most of the world’s money is not, in fact, green.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- baal80spam 2mo ago
  Ah, so then you became a plumber!
  - cavem0nkey 2mo ago
    Sewage worker
sph 2mo ago
But why? I like writing code. Why in the world would I want to become someone that doesn't write code?
- paxys 2mo ago
  The person paying you doesn’t care about your enjoyment.
  - sph 2mo ago
    I do care about my enjoyment. Or should my existence, wants and dreams solely be defined by my current employer? Are yours?
    - tuesdaynight 2mo ago
      I don't understand what you want to hear. You can still code manually all you want, but people will not pay you for doing that in the near future. You can still do it for your personal projects.
      - greazy 2mo ago
        You're right, they won't be paying me to write code in the near future... They will be paying me to fix code. Good times ahead!
      - vips7L 2mo ago
        Yes they will.
      - bravetraveler 2mo ago
        > I don't understand what you want to hear ... in the near future. Interjecting, here. Perhaps not an academic repeat of five years ago; is this an eon for Technology or not long enough? I've lost track. Anyway, I appreciate the optimism. An anecdote, from the ground floor: this industry has shown it's paying leagues of on-site hands to install systems, at scale, from USB keys. PXE products have existed for decades; we're writing one [to adopt] when we could take one off the shelf. These artisanal OS installations are too rich for my blood. Or, they would be, if this modernization didn't happen to be the code I'm still writing by hand. Half a decade in (or several) depending on perspective. I'll believe things are progressing as you say... when this type of mismanagement stops happening like clockwork. Want more chatbots/datacenters? Catch up to the mid-1980s; BOOTP 'just' dropped.

tayo42 2mo ago

I feel like theres so much churn and change there's no point in trying to keep up.

lbreakjai 2mo ago
Remember six months ago when linkedin people were adamant you needed to keep on top of everything not to get "left behind"? Agents, skills, mcps, swarms ... If anything, my setup has gotten ever so simpler as models got better.
- sph 2mo ago
  Why go on Linkedin? The "don't get left behind" people are all in this comment section.
- vips7L 2mo ago
  Can’t get left behind by people who can’t write a crud endpoint or an email by themselves.

skywhopper 2mo ago

That’s fine, and you’re doing fine. In fact, in a few years you will probably be far more skilled than most “software engineers”.

adamtaylor_13 2mo ago
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct). Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI? I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer. Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.) All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!) It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.
- miyoji 2mo ago
  > Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Either you work in a non-standard field, or your standards for software are way too low. What software gets to fail 80% of the time? If your ecommerce checkout software fails 1 in 5 times, you don't have an ecommerce business at all, you are dead in the water. If your airline booking software fails for 1 in 5 customers, you are out of business. 99.99% reliability still means 1 in 10000 customers are experiencing an error, which at scale can mean thousands to millions per day. That's completely unacceptable for any software I've ever been involved with writing.

avgDev 2mo ago

I open my editor, I need to implement a feature, I tell chatGPT what I need, it reviews my code and provides suggestions. I then tell it to implement it. I then tell it to write tests. I review the code. I test it. I have another AI do code review. I push it to test, then after tests to production. For some common tasks, that I don't find interesting it is great. I do a lot of CRUD, I honestly cannot imagine writing these apps without AI. It made curious and freed my brain to think about other things. I am now playing with hardware and plan on launching a niche product. This would not be possible if I 100% committed to programming without AI.

catfood 2mo ago

Letting it rip and give it full infra, db, dns, all the keys to the castle, drinking from a telemetry firehose the whole time, a huge tangled web of integrations that all kind of works. I think just offloading as much as possible is the state of things.