I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.
Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.
I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.
>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code
The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering
There is some truth to that, thus i wonder, if they will not solve that by creating architectural harnesses. Like look at repo x. Condense its coding style and architecture into a prompt. Remember that prompt everytime you create a new module.
But i get where you sre coming from
I agree with your take if we talking about large complex industrial software
but guess what ???? most software don't
Timmy don't need to understand how landing page works in order to sell his cookie startup online
see where I am going ???? You are not get replaced
AI just replace people that work in "dirty and crude" work, think of its like wordpress plugin fixer from third world country
this is part of industry that you never touch and not want to work
I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.
However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.
It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.
I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.
But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.
I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.
It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.
I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.
There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.
Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?
Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.
It feels like spending your teens practicing football, playing varsity level in high school, getting really good at the college level, finally recruited into the NFL as a pro football player (dream came true!!) and suddenly, the team owner says, "No more football playing for you. You get the same salary but you're managing robots who play the football. Deal with it."
I hadn't thought of that type of comparison, but it's apt.
Speaking for myself. Not really. The problem that I had with enjoying programming was that many of my coworkers who didn't enjoy programming have some opinions that were frustrating to need to entertain.
Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.
In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.
If they haven't worked a day in their life before, then who has built all the software products we use today and from which LLMs are endlessly benefitting?
when i say haven't worked a day in their life, I mean it in terms of the aphorism "if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life".
Ah, OK, gotcha. Thanks for clearing it up.
I don't think your comment is very well thought out. It seems to me your conclusion argues against your topic sentence.
> It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.
True, but dealing with agents is still easier than dealing with people (at least for introverted personalities). That being said, you still need to deal with other people's army of agents.
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