It was weird to read this. I know antirez is on HN, so it's strange to say this, but here goes...
I always looked up to antirez. Redis was really taking off after I graduated and I was impressed by the whole system and the person behind it. I was impressed to see them walk away to do something different after being so successful. I was impressed to read their blog about tackling difficult problems and how they solved them.
I'm not a 10x programmer. I don't chase MVPs or shipping features. I like when my manager isn't paying attention and I can dig into a problem and just try things out. Our database queries have issues? Maybe I can write my own AST by parsing just part of the code. Things like that.
I love BUILDING, not SHIPPING. I learn and grow when I code. Maybe my job will require me to vibe code everything some day just to keep up with the juniors, but in my free time I will use AI only enough to help speed up my typing. Every vibe coded app I've made has been unmaintainable spaghetti and it takes the joy out of it. What's the point of that?
To bring it all together, I guess some part of me was disappointed to see a person that I considered a really good programmer, seem to indicate that they didn't care about doing the actual programming?
> Writing code is no longer needed for the most part
> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now.
This is the mentality of the big companies pushing AI. Write more code faster. Make more things faster. Get paid the same, understand less, get woken up in the middle of the night when your brittle AI code breaks.
Maybe that's why antirez is so prolific and I'm not.
Sometimes I wish I was a computer scientist, instead of a programmer...
I care a lot about programming, but I want to do programming in a way that makes me special compared to machines. When the LLM hits a limit, and I write a function in a way it can't compete, that is good. If I write a very small program that is like a small piece of poetry, this is good human expression. But if I need to develop a feature, and I have a clear design idea, and I can do it in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks, how to justify with myself that just for what I love I use a lot more time? That would be too much of ego, I believe. So even if for me too this is painful, as a transition, I need to adapt. Fortunately I also enjoyed a lot the desing / ideas process, so I can focus on that. And write code myself when needed.
> To bring it all together, I guess some part of me was disappointed to see a person that I considered a really good programmer, seem to indicate that they didn't care about doing the actual programming?
My take on this is that we as a society are now on the verge of transitioning towards programming as an art form. And the methodologies of art vs non art programming are vastly different.
Take clothes, for example. Manufacturing is vastly optimized for throughput, but its art form is heavily optimized for design and customization. Maybe that is what all this is about now with programming, too?
I too would think of myself as someone who likes to code for the sake of explorative understanding and optimization. I'm pretty bad at the last 10%, like _reeeally_ bad actually.
But I am aware that the methodology of programming is changing. And currently I believe that design and customization might in parts also change, because a lot of LLM- / slop-coded successful projects were optimizing for something like text-in-the-loop where they started with a terminal CLI and made it a real design later, because the LLM agent was able to parse and understand CLI / TTY characters.
Maybe this is what it's actually about. Maybe we need to optimize things for text now so that LLMs can help us more in these topics?
I'm thinking lately a lot about scene graphs and event graphs and how to make them serializable so that I can be more efficient in generating UIs. Sorry for babbling, maybe these are just thoughts I'm gonna regret in the future.
> My take on this is that we as a society are now on the verge of transitioning towards programming as an art form.
It already was. This just makes it a subscription service.