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I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking pr

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sense to abandon programming in favor of delegating to agents that can do more in less time, but for programmers, it is a loss. Either be a programmer and code, or be a delegator and delegate, you aren’t going to make the life of a delegator suck any less by trying to trick yourself into thinking you’re programming.

bundie 1mo ago
"We're reinventing coding from first principles" /s
darthcircuit 1mo ago
I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new programming language is just in your native tongue. I’m not a full time dev, but I code quite a bit doing Systems and OPs stuff, but AI has opened up an entirely new world to me and it has expanded my ability to think through a problem. It’s the ultimate rubber ducky. I love to watch the reasoning process while I’m in opencode so I can interrupt if I see it going down a path that doesn’t make sense. It’s opened another world to me that allows me to implement ideas I’ve had for years without the time to invest in the skills needed to even try the idea. I think it’s just how you use the tool.
- reticulates 1mo ago
  I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :) My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age is over, our skills aren’t useless, they can still be applied to making things with modern tools, but it is no longer on our terms, no longer programming, no longer the meditative thinking process it once was. For non-programmers, this is their golden age, the reign of programmer tyranny is over.
  - politician 1mo ago
    I'd argue that this is the golden age for consultants. The old equation was several expensive programmers per project. The new equation is a clown with a token budget plus an expensive rescue operation. In either case, the project will still be late, and it'll cost roughly the same.
  - timcobb 1mo ago
    What were programmers' terms?
    - mllev15 1mo ago
      The code
  - pixelatedindex 1mo ago
    I sympathize with this take but I think it’s conflating programming as a hobby vs code needed to run a business. I always believed that programming was solving problems and building things. With AI, you can still solve problems - the better your questions/ prompts the faster you get to your answer. To ask those questions you need to probably have that meditative thinking to grasp the crux of what you’re trying to solve. On the business side, paying a programmer for their meditative time would be the first line item to cut, when you can bark orders at an idiot savant instead.
    - dotancohen 1mo ago
      When a business pays me to develop software, that's a lot more than coding. Sometimes it takes weeks to just translate the business needs into a plan, budget, and timeline (not that I ever meet it). Often that includes documentation, training, infra, and a maintenance contract (hopefully with retainer). The coding really is such a small part of that process.
      - pixelatedindex 1mo ago
        Absolutely. And honestly, I don't think AI can really replace that. It can execute a plan, but it can't really figure out the best plan from a sea of unknowns strewn within people's minds. There's a certain meditative aspect to this stream of work still, but I would hesitate to call it "programming".
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  > I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code I don't think this is true any more; you need to ask the agent to inspect the system, draw up plans with the system's current shape in mind, then after it's done writing the code, ask for it to review the code, and make sure it's as minimal and high quality as possible a couple of times. Creating programs really doesn't need deep understanding of the fundamentals any more. It needs a shallow understanding, and a willingness to manually test a lot.
  - vdombr 1mo ago
    And I'm personally not happy with that. To manually test something, we have QA, to shape business requirements, we have a business analyst and a product owner. Now a developer needs to be a 3-in-1 person?
    - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
      No, the AI takes care of everything but the final manual testing, mostly. It's improving on all aspects over time, too. It's not that much work.
      - danielvaughn 1mo ago
        For software within a certain complexity scope, this is true. Like the average SaaS CRUD experience that many web developers were building before AI - a lot of that can be handled almost entirely by agents, with very little human in the loop activity. But past a certain point of scale/complexity, this breaks down rapidly. In the past 8 months I've seen this occur several times, and if you only rely on agents to get you to that point, then you're in a heap of trouble when you do reach it, because it's very hard to backtrack.
        a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
        AI has mostly been improving faster than the complexity of the projects people are capable of handling has increased. The lines are going to cross soon.
- ghtbircshotbe 1mo ago
  I agree with you but for a different reason. When the ai generates exactly what I asked it to but it isn't working, I need to think and figure out what I really want rather than what I previously thought I wanted.
- bah9 1mo ago
  "The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"? "but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code. Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack
  - nharziro 1mo ago
    When I read stuff like this people I feel like people haven't yet accepted reality. I think knowing how to write code made a lot of people feel very special. Like the could do something magical, and now feel like that's being taken a way from them. I've been writing code since I was a child and spent my entire career as a software engineer, so I understand where these people are coming from, but the reality is AI has changed this profession and this skill set forever. People need to deal with this and move. You can still do very special things with AI that a "normal" person cannot do, so focus your energy there.
    - bah9 1mo ago
      What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living
      - nharziro 1mo ago
        I never said it was easy but it's clear that you're not coping well with new world order. Unfortunately for a lot people, it's here to stay do get used to it.
pizzly 1mo ago
Agree with programming is meditative but disagree that agent-based development means there is no thinking. Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, trying to manage your time and your agents time to increase the amount of work produced in the same time, asking the agent about the code and making new decisions. For many people who went in programming thats not their strong suite and hence is really exhausting. Instead of living in the code you are managing the code and using a part of the brain you are not good at.
- jsjsjdjdjdb 1mo ago
  > Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, Whose manager is making these decisions? My managers have always been concerned with how much workload everyone has, delegating tasks at an extremely high level that they barely understand, and handling the messy human interface between their reports and senior leadership so that everyone on their team is kept happy and properly compensated. I have been in this industry for almost twenty years and I have NEVER had an engineering manager making architecture decisions (that's either my job or the lead engineer's job, depending) or UX interface decisions (that's the realm of Product). If my LLM agents start taking sick leaves and pager duty rotations then I'll start entertaining this bullshit line about being a manager
  - pas 1mo ago
    designers, team leads, tech leads, architects, senior devs are all doing this kind of formal or informal management work just because someone doesn't have the "manager" in their job title they might still do a lot of supervision
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  You should probably be deferring to the agent on nearly all architecture decisions; it's trained on a lot more architectures than you'll ever see in your life, and it does a better job of designing architectures for common problems than many engineers at this point. You have to ask it to consider the architecture, or it'll cut the shortest path to any solution, but if you ask it, it'll come up with likely a better approach than you would have invented. Your job is mostly to ask it to think about all the aspects, and then do manual testing on the output. The agent can take care of the rest.
cyanydeez 1mo ago
If we really could develop in UML, that'd be a nice sweet spot. But everything I read about the rise and fall of UML is: it's great to start, but never keeps pace with day to day code changes and becomes almost useless out of the gate as real edges force different paradigms. Now, if you could wake my AI up in the middle of the night and by morning my UML is is perfectly aligned, or the reverse, my UML realigns the code, that'd probably be a sweet deal. but complexity is hidden in there either way.
- wccrawford 1mo ago
  The AIs can read images and charts. If you want to try programming with UML, you should absolutely try it. My guess is that you'll initially be absolutely gobsmacked, but then the problems will start to show and it'll be frustrating as well.
  - projektfu 1mo ago
    Let's be honest, programmers can't program from UML specs.
    - wccrawford 1mo ago
      Yeah. I think it'd be fun to watch an LLM try, though. I'm imagining that it'll really show all the things in the UML that don't fully make sense, but look great at first.
zuzululu 1mo ago
i think this is a fascinating cognitive dissonance on display: > there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. why do you think software teams exist? it was exactly for that purpose for non developers to do what you described but perhaps varying degree of politeness and professionalism. > For businesses it makes sense to abandon programming in favor of delegating to agents that can do more in less time, business operators were never in the business of coding. code never had any value to them. code isn't what they interact with. I think a lot of software engineers confuse intrinsic value of the thing they produce with the interface that ultimately drives them. It was never code. And now AI agents replace a large portion of what software engineers used to do. I've already seen many shops with 20~30 full stack teams downsize by 80% . You just don't need that many people anymore. A competent engineer, AI budget can absolutely replace large teams because the size of the thing never really mattered beyond what they can intake in terms of natural language demands.
- xboxnolifes 1mo ago
  Where is the cognitive dissonance? You're just repeating what they said but from a negative angle of saying programmers enjoying coding means they are confused about its worth. They pretty clearly say they enjoyed the intrinsic value of writing code and do not enjoy the act of piloting AI minions.
cma 1mo ago
> Either be a programmer and code, or be a delegator and delegate Even if you just enjoy programming for the sake of programming, you can use it to review your code and then hand verify its findings, or prototype and explore feasibility of something you will in the end fully code yourself. For most people that enjoy programming there are still tasks they don't enjoy, like making a bunch of cross-language bindings for something that doesn't have an automatic way to generate them.
- bah9 1mo ago
  Nope. You can't. Expectations and deadlines aligned with code agent usage. No one let you spent x5 time coding things yourself
  - Anamon 1mo ago
    That's a problem of visibility, though. No one in management currently cares much that the delegator is actually the one 5 times less efficient in the long run (or just the one leaving the rest of the team with years of technical debt). The exact same thing was the case with the outsourcing hype. Of course, nobody learned their lesson because those managers who messed everything up were long gone by the time the bills came due and everything broke down.
duttish 1mo ago
For me thinking and understanding is the primary bottleneck. Sure I could spin up 4-5 more parallel things but it doesn't matter because they're soon bottlenecked by my writing/review of their input or output. I can manage 1-2, maybe 3 if one is a long term running task. And having thinking be the bottleneck makes for a very taxing workload... I tend to work like this: 1. Write a very vague spec of what I want 2. Iterate on that with claude until there's no major open questions. 3. Depending on the size either turn that into a requirements file (large things), a design (medium things) or an implementation plan (small things). Implementation plans for large / medium tasks are split into phases. 4. Once all the plans are iterated on and approved I send claude off to implement with subagents, but not commit. I usually find some weird stuff when reviewing the code to fix before commit. Any time I've let claude commit I've ended up with weird stuff.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
fzeindl 1mo ago
From a great lecture on agentic SLDC: „Checking the work is not the same as doing the work.“ It‘s different. There are people who love coding but don‘t like checking written code. Or the other way around. Also there’s difference in mental load: checking a finished program or algorithm can be harder than working through it while producing it.

bundie 1mo ago

"We're reinventing coding from first principles" /s

darthcircuit 1mo ago

I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new programming language is just in your native tongue. I’m not a full time dev, but I code quite a bit doing Systems and OPs stuff, but AI has opened up an entirely new world to me and it has expanded my ability to think through a problem. It’s the ultimate rubber ducky. I love to watch the reasoning process while I’m in opencode so I can interrupt if I see it going down a path that doesn’t make sense. It’s opened another world to me that allows me to implement ideas I’ve had for years without the time to invest in the skills needed to even try the idea. I think it’s just how you use the tool.

reticulates 1mo ago
I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :) My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age is over, our skills aren’t useless, they can still be applied to making things with modern tools, but it is no longer on our terms, no longer programming, no longer the meditative thinking process it once was. For non-programmers, this is their golden age, the reign of programmer tyranny is over.
- politician 1mo ago
  I'd argue that this is the golden age for consultants. The old equation was several expensive programmers per project. The new equation is a clown with a token budget plus an expensive rescue operation. In either case, the project will still be late, and it'll cost roughly the same.
- timcobb 1mo ago
  What were programmers' terms?
  - mllev15 1mo ago
    The code
- pixelatedindex 1mo ago
  I sympathize with this take but I think it’s conflating programming as a hobby vs code needed to run a business. I always believed that programming was solving problems and building things. With AI, you can still solve problems - the better your questions/ prompts the faster you get to your answer. To ask those questions you need to probably have that meditative thinking to grasp the crux of what you’re trying to solve. On the business side, paying a programmer for their meditative time would be the first line item to cut, when you can bark orders at an idiot savant instead.
  - dotancohen 1mo ago
    When a business pays me to develop software, that's a lot more than coding. Sometimes it takes weeks to just translate the business needs into a plan, budget, and timeline (not that I ever meet it). Often that includes documentation, training, infra, and a maintenance contract (hopefully with retainer). The coding really is such a small part of that process.
    - pixelatedindex 1mo ago
      Absolutely. And honestly, I don't think AI can really replace that. It can execute a plan, but it can't really figure out the best plan from a sea of unknowns strewn within people's minds. There's a certain meditative aspect to this stream of work still, but I would hesitate to call it "programming".
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
> I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code I don't think this is true any more; you need to ask the agent to inspect the system, draw up plans with the system's current shape in mind, then after it's done writing the code, ask for it to review the code, and make sure it's as minimal and high quality as possible a couple of times. Creating programs really doesn't need deep understanding of the fundamentals any more. It needs a shallow understanding, and a willingness to manually test a lot.
- vdombr 1mo ago
  And I'm personally not happy with that. To manually test something, we have QA, to shape business requirements, we have a business analyst and a product owner. Now a developer needs to be a 3-in-1 person?
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    No, the AI takes care of everything but the final manual testing, mostly. It's improving on all aspects over time, too. It's not that much work.
    - danielvaughn 1mo ago
      For software within a certain complexity scope, this is true. Like the average SaaS CRUD experience that many web developers were building before AI - a lot of that can be handled almost entirely by agents, with very little human in the loop activity. But past a certain point of scale/complexity, this breaks down rapidly. In the past 8 months I've seen this occur several times, and if you only rely on agents to get you to that point, then you're in a heap of trouble when you do reach it, because it's very hard to backtrack.
      - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
        AI has mostly been improving faster than the complexity of the projects people are capable of handling has increased. The lines are going to cross soon.
ghtbircshotbe 1mo ago
I agree with you but for a different reason. When the ai generates exactly what I asked it to but it isn't working, I need to think and figure out what I really want rather than what I previously thought I wanted.
bah9 1mo ago
"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"? "but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code. Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack
- nharziro 1mo ago
  When I read stuff like this people I feel like people haven't yet accepted reality. I think knowing how to write code made a lot of people feel very special. Like the could do something magical, and now feel like that's being taken a way from them. I've been writing code since I was a child and spent my entire career as a software engineer, so I understand where these people are coming from, but the reality is AI has changed this profession and this skill set forever. People need to deal with this and move. You can still do very special things with AI that a "normal" person cannot do, so focus your energy there.
  - bah9 1mo ago
    What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living
    - nharziro 1mo ago
      I never said it was easy but it's clear that you're not coping well with new world order. Unfortunately for a lot people, it's here to stay do get used to it.

pizzly 1mo ago

Agree with programming is meditative but disagree that agent-based development means there is no thinking. Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, trying to manage your time and your agents time to increase the amount of work produced in the same time, asking the agent about the code and making new decisions. For many people who went in programming thats not their strong suite and hence is really exhausting. Instead of living in the code you are managing the code and using a part of the brain you are not good at.

jsjsjdjdjdb 1mo ago
> Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, Whose manager is making these decisions? My managers have always been concerned with how much workload everyone has, delegating tasks at an extremely high level that they barely understand, and handling the messy human interface between their reports and senior leadership so that everyone on their team is kept happy and properly compensated. I have been in this industry for almost twenty years and I have NEVER had an engineering manager making architecture decisions (that's either my job or the lead engineer's job, depending) or UX interface decisions (that's the realm of Product). If my LLM agents start taking sick leaves and pager duty rotations then I'll start entertaining this bullshit line about being a manager
- pas 1mo ago
  designers, team leads, tech leads, architects, senior devs are all doing this kind of formal or informal management work just because someone doesn't have the "manager" in their job title they might still do a lot of supervision
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
You should probably be deferring to the agent on nearly all architecture decisions; it's trained on a lot more architectures than you'll ever see in your life, and it does a better job of designing architectures for common problems than many engineers at this point. You have to ask it to consider the architecture, or it'll cut the shortest path to any solution, but if you ask it, it'll come up with likely a better approach than you would have invented. Your job is mostly to ask it to think about all the aspects, and then do manual testing on the output. The agent can take care of the rest.

cyanydeez 1mo ago

If we really could develop in UML, that'd be a nice sweet spot. But everything I read about the rise and fall of UML is: it's great to start, but never keeps pace with day to day code changes and becomes almost useless out of the gate as real edges force different paradigms. Now, if you could wake my AI up in the middle of the night and by morning my UML is is perfectly aligned, or the reverse, my UML realigns the code, that'd probably be a sweet deal. but complexity is hidden in there either way.

wccrawford 1mo ago
The AIs can read images and charts. If you want to try programming with UML, you should absolutely try it. My guess is that you'll initially be absolutely gobsmacked, but then the problems will start to show and it'll be frustrating as well.
- projektfu 1mo ago
  Let's be honest, programmers can't program from UML specs.
  - wccrawford 1mo ago
    Yeah. I think it'd be fun to watch an LLM try, though. I'm imagining that it'll really show all the things in the UML that don't fully make sense, but look great at first.

zuzululu 1mo ago

i think this is a fascinating cognitive dissonance on display: > there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. why do you think software teams exist? it was exactly for that purpose for non developers to do what you described but perhaps varying degree of politeness and professionalism. > For businesses it makes sense to abandon programming in favor of delegating to agents that can do more in less time, business operators were never in the business of coding. code never had any value to them. code isn't what they interact with. I think a lot of software engineers confuse intrinsic value of the thing they produce with the interface that ultimately drives them. It was never code. And now AI agents replace a large portion of what software engineers used to do. I've already seen many shops with 20~30 full stack teams downsize by 80% . You just don't need that many people anymore. A competent engineer, AI budget can absolutely replace large teams because the size of the thing never really mattered beyond what they can intake in terms of natural language demands.

xboxnolifes 1mo ago
Where is the cognitive dissonance? You're just repeating what they said but from a negative angle of saying programmers enjoying coding means they are confused about its worth. They pretty clearly say they enjoyed the intrinsic value of writing code and do not enjoy the act of piloting AI minions.

cma 1mo ago

> Either be a programmer and code, or be a delegator and delegate Even if you just enjoy programming for the sake of programming, you can use it to review your code and then hand verify its findings, or prototype and explore feasibility of something you will in the end fully code yourself. For most people that enjoy programming there are still tasks they don't enjoy, like making a bunch of cross-language bindings for something that doesn't have an automatic way to generate them.

bah9 1mo ago
Nope. You can't. Expectations and deadlines aligned with code agent usage. No one let you spent x5 time coding things yourself
- Anamon 1mo ago
  That's a problem of visibility, though. No one in management currently cares much that the delegator is actually the one 5 times less efficient in the long run (or just the one leaving the rest of the team with years of technical debt). The exact same thing was the case with the outsourcing hype. Of course, nobody learned their lesson because those managers who messed everything up were long gone by the time the bills came due and everything broke down.

duttish 1mo ago

For me thinking and understanding is the primary bottleneck. Sure I could spin up 4-5 more parallel things but it doesn't matter because they're soon bottlenecked by my writing/review of their input or output. I can manage 1-2, maybe 3 if one is a long term running task. And having thinking be the bottleneck makes for a very taxing workload... I tend to work like this: 1. Write a very vague spec of what I want 2. Iterate on that with claude until there's no major open questions. 3. Depending on the size either turn that into a requirements file (large things), a design (medium things) or an implementation plan (small things). Implementation plans for large / medium tasks are split into phases. 4. Once all the plans are iterated on and approved I send claude off to implement with subagents, but not commit. I usually find some weird stuff when reviewing the code to fix before commit. Any time I've let claude commit I've ended up with weird stuff.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

fzeindl 1mo ago

From a great lecture on agentic SLDC: „Checking the work is not the same as doing the work.“ It‘s different. There are people who love coding but don‘t like checking written code. Or the other way around. Also there’s difference in mental load: checking a finished program or algorithm can be harder than working through it while producing it.