Coding by hand is not mere typing symbols into editor that LLMs are now replacing, it’s thinking, abstracting, deciding how to apply your knowledge and experience, searching for information.
And of course in the current workplace where there’s often a push from managers to use LLMs as much as possible and to put as much work as possible on yourself, in this churn junior will not get to learn anything besides prompting and simple tooling.
> thinking, abstracting, deciding how to apply your knowledge and experience, searching for information
None of this requires coding by hand. I can do those things better and faster with agents helping me. That incudes unfamiliar areas where I am effectively a junior.
I didn’t speak English my early teenage years, and that haven’t stopped me from reading books about programming in my native language. I remember spending hours in bookshops, excited to pick up next book to devour and try out.
I don't believe in victimhood and so didn't want to go here, but since we are comparing notes:
English alphabets came into my education at the age of 10. I got my first computer at the age of 21. I began speaking broken English around the age of 23. Proper internet at the age of 25 or so.
Not to mention, my native language doesn't have programming books, even today.
Of course, an avid reader and Science nerd here. Curiosity and tinkering never stopped.
Out of curiosity. What is your first/native language?
In my country, english is hardly anyones first language, but its' mandatory in schools so I've never had the experience with having to find knowledge but its gate-kept behind a translation wall.
My native language is Gujarati. Done my schooling and college in Gujarati too.
Absolutely, I understand what you're saying.
One of the things people miss out, in most of the discussions is that they think "if you were really serious, you would have figured it out". I agree with that in most instances but language and skill acquisition is a complex process as everyone knows.
English being the de-facto reservoir of programming knowledge and applications, it takes substantial amount of time and effort to cross the threshold of understanding and transference.
In any case, I'm an eternal optimist and I believe in action. It was a great experience listening to people's opinion here and I was kind of shocked to find that some of them are so siloed in their chambers, that's interesting nonetheless.
Up until about four months ago, the sentiment by so many programmers online (here, reddit, etc) was that LLMs were absolutely useless at coding. And yet, many of us were puzzled, because we were having success with them, at coding.
People were burying their heads.
Today, there are not many of those people left. Some, but not a lot. Because you can only deny reality for so long.
I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.
I don't know, but my assumption is these things will get better to a point where they will be automating close to 100% of coding, and deploying, and verifying, etc. The old job we had will be completely changed well before 10 years. I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.
> I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.
Last I saw about a week ago, the stats were about 35%. There may be some confusion around this:
1. The absolute number could have remained the same but the sheer volume of vibe-coders who never coded before raised the percentage. For example, if 100 out of a population of 1000 people uses AI then the percentage is 10%. If, over the next year 9k new vibers were created but none of the existing 1000 people changed their workflow, you will see 9100 people out of 10000 people using AI - that's now a 91% rate of people using AI to code even though none of the people since last year changed the way they work.
2. Last I checked, pre-AI, there were about 12m working developers in the world (SO survey extrapolated). As of February this year, CC, by itself, had 60k subscribers. Even if we err on the side of optimism and assume every single subscriber is running the agent, that's still not 95% of developers.
> I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.
??? We already know what it looks like - "Business Analyst" has bee a role since forever (at least since 1995, when I entered the workforce). If you wanted a role where you wrote no code but merely drew up specs for the programmers to code, you could have had it as a BA.
It's just that few of us wanted to do that as it paid half what an engineer made. Now with the supply of BAs potentially doubling, it will pay a quarter of what an engineer used to make.
Since roughly 1995 or so we've been in a world where quality tooling was provided by on the order of 1,000s of developers, mostly open source. GNU, Xorg, Apache, emacs, nginx, and so on. Or you could opt in to the Microsoft ecosystem.
The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors.
I elide a nearly infinite amount of detail, obviously.
What's new now is that you can get your own window manager written to spec in under a week, perhaps much more quickly, not just choose one of a few major window managers and configure it in accordance with the chosen configuration options delivered by the large developer team.
The reason I don’t bother writing code this days is because my use cases have been solved, and if they weren’t, I’d tweak the most suitable candidate. One of my principles is to keep my workload small. More often than not, things starts with a small script or plugin, and then grow according to my needs. Why replicate what others have already done?
If others have built a whole-ass house and I just occasionally need the kitchen table I had to just deal with the hassle of having a whole house and just used the table. And even the table was the wrong shape, but I could deal with it. Asking the Others to make the table modifiable would've been a massive effort of PRs and mailing lists I didn't want to get into.
Now I can build a bespoke table in an evening or two and it fits my stuff just perfectly.
I could do it before too, but it would've taken too long for me to bother, so I dealt with the whole house along with the table.
Because its fun. And because your experience using a tool is fundamentally different if you made it yourself, compared to if its something someone else made for you.
I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
It never felt fun for me to write software fully with LLMs. It feels disorientating, it produces a lot of code that you have no familiarity with and no authorship. It feels like you’re a teenager again, copy pasting code from internet or journal and hoping it will work.
This is nice, but is also leagues away from something you’re written yourself. Take LLMs out of equation, and you have piles of code that you barely recognise and barely can edit or tweak by yourself.
I dont think it matters at all to OP. Sidestepping the insult, it sounds like they very, very much want to tools that support their needs only, methodology be damned.
I don’t think the time sink is that significant with many tools, especially since you can take existing projects and change them. And it’s fun to hack!
It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc
I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.
There are far richer things for me to do with my life.
I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.
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