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fragmede 3 days ago

It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.)

So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have.

As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.