I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations.

Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.

You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.

I worked on visual studio at Microsoft 20 years ago, and once had the opportunity to go to a trade show to represent the company.

While I was manning a booth, this software developer came up to me and said VS had gotten too good at code generation to automate data access, and we should cut it out because that was the vast majority of what he did. I thought he was joking, but no, he was totally serious.

I said something to him about how those tools were saving him from having to do boring, repetitive work so that he could focus on higher value, more interesting development, instead, but he wasn’t having it.

I think about him quite often, especially these days. I wonder if he’s still programming, and what he thinks about LLMs

I think I partially agree, your first paragraph is exactly how I feel. Boilerplate and trivial stuff absolutely should be automated. It's also true that people have been pushing a narrative where programming is some dark art and you should use Methodology X or Theory Y. Bro, chill, you're writing a website.

On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level. It's fashionable to claim we all have bullshit jobs, but I don't think that's a fair description at all.

+1, and also to add: this isn't even a new phenomenon. My hot take is that AI coding is only the latest in a trend that has been running in the industry for literally decades. The technology itself might be novel but what it's doing is very, very old!

You used to have to write tons of real code to stand up something as simple as a backend endpoint. Now a lot of this stuff is literally declarative config files.

Ditto frontends. You used to have to imperative manage all kinds of weird bullshit, but over the last decade we've gradually moved to... declarative, reactive patterns that let the some underlying framework handle the busywork.

We also created... declarative config files to ensure consistent deploys every time. You know, instead of ssh'ing into production machines to install stuff.

We used to handle null pointers, too, and tore our hair out because a single missed check caused your whole process to go poof. Now... it's built into the language and it is physically impossible to pull of a null pointer dereference. Awesome!

We've been "putting ourselves out of work" for going on decades now, getting rid of more boilerplate, more repetitive and error-prone logic, etc etc. We did it with programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. All in the service of focusing on the bits we actually care about and that matter to us.

This is only the latest in a long line of things software engineers did to put themselves out of work. The method of doing it is very new, the ends are not. And like every other thing that came before it, I highly doubt this one will actually succeed in putting us out of work.

Me neither, that's why I write higher level abstractions or use libraries and languages other people have written. I don't get how you were writing so much boring stuff manually before LLMs. What do you do?

I massively agree. Huge amounts of coding isn’t wild new inventions, it’s not unknowable work like so many seem to suggest when asked to estimate time. Frankly it’s not even conceptually hard, it’s just that computers are fast and accurate and dumb so you need to be annoyingly precise. Imagine if a human refuses to read a manual because a comma should have been a semicolon. Plenty of people are smart enough to do it, but lack either the knowledge about this or the desire to deal with it.

Most of this work should go away. Much of the rest of it should be achievable by the domain experts themselves at a fraction of the cost.

Programming is about not doing all of these things. You have a powerful machine that is quite good at doing those things. You just have to notice those patterns and then build the tool that will be doing those kind of works. And the most simple one is a snippet generator and editors macros. Then you have project generators, and code reuse thingies from the programming language.

I agree with this take, insofar as I interpret it as "we do a lot of bullshit that doesn't matter". Like, do you remember people arguing Rails vs Django, or even worse Rails vs Sinatra? I do and did, and my meager defense is that I was young and naive. The list of "I can't believe we spent any time building/doing any of that" is just so, so long. I mean, how many times are we gonna reimplement node ffs.

I always thought programming as being a touch more like two imbecile brothers outsmarting Max Von Sydow's plan to control the world with tainted beer and hockey arena organs.

And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?

My job pays well and I create real stuff but most of the work is honestly just slop. So maybe I should use AI to save myself the effort..I could salvage more free time for myself that way..