For what is worth, it had nothing to do with whether he uses AI. I'm north of 60yo, started on punched cards and paper tape and have been programming ever since. My experience suggests if you aren't keeping up by using AI now there is a good chance you won't be a relevant software engineer in a decades time.

The bit that triggered my response is this:

> Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote.

Yes, I know a lot of programmers who do that. In fact it seems most programmers I see in the industry do that. Many of them are very good at it, in the sense that a good brick layer will be content to devote his lifetime to laying bricks in a straight line and will be far more reliable and conscientious at it than I could every be. However, that personality type is unlikely to become a top engineer or architect. To be good at those jobs you need to get bored in a couple of years at most. You have to be internally driven to try new things, and experiment with new ideas.

When such a person is confronted with the prospect of a lifetime of churning out code that almost follows a template (and I daresay could easily be produced by today's LLM's) he doesn't sit still and do it. He finds something more interesting to do. Since he's a computer programmer and the task is well suited a computer doing it, he probably take up a skunk works project of churning out the repetitive parts of that code, so he didn't have to do it. It's far more fun, saves time in the long run, and if he is a good software engineer in the long run the systems it produces will be more reliable, and use less code than something programmer code have produced by churning out the same stuff every day for years.

Going by the OP's comment, he hasn't done that, despite apparently being bored shitless with what he does do. There is a solution, but it isn't the LLM's he suggests. All using LLM's change is the language are giving to the "compiler". The end result is still him creating the same CRUD app using the same platforms, libraries and tools his is using now.

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kasey_junk 3 days ago | parent [-]

There are lots and lots of us who have gone down the road of generalizing code and have decided the outcomes, for the business that pays for the software, are worse. Frequently it devolves into code that is hard to reason about, architecture that is overblown for purpose or that does something just about, but not exactly, what you want it to do.

But more importantly, by dismissing the comment that way, you’ve made an implicit claim. You are claiming to be able to judge a persons capability or the challenges they are working on off of a couple hn comments. Thats bad engineering and anti-social behavior.

Imagine telling someone that learning to touch type was the sign of a bad software engineer because you don’t type that much because your libraries are all named with single letters. Thats what these arguments sound like to me.

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rstuart4133 2 days ago | parent [-]

> But more importantly, by dismissing the comment that way, you’ve made an implicit claim. You are claiming to be able to judge a persons capability or the challenges they are working on off of a couple hn comments. Thats bad engineering and anti-social behavior.

Somewhat true. But it did make me smile, because it reads very much like the pot telling kettle he's black.

But only somewhat. @tptacek also said this:

> 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.

Seriously?

As I said, I've been programmer for decades now. He's coming from the perspective that the code dribbling off my fingertips without too much thought is "programming". It is, of course, in the same sense that the brush strokes of Van Gogh are what constitutes "painting". But the painting created by Van Gogh consisted of thousands if not millions brush strokes, all placed with precision, purpose and a great deal of thought. If placing the loaded brush on canvas is all there was to painting, all our houses would be adorned with Van Gogh's. He says we should all be using LLM's, but the idea that brush strokes placed by an LLM would produce same outcome is laughable. You might well use a painting LLM to paint 1000's of houses, but never a single Van Gogh.

To the people who delight in creating new and unique computer systems from code, the puzzle to be solved is arranging the code in just the right way to create their personal Van Gogh's. An immutable object here, a touch of recursion there, combined with an atomic compare and swap and in some truly heroic cases an FPGA thrown into the mix to get some extreme parallelism - crafting these in just the right mix is the challenge of programming. Overcoming that challenge is what makes it invigorating. Not writing the "fucking unit tests" as tptacek puts it, which is almost universally disliked. Although now I look back on it, it is almost therapeutic - it's like going for a jog; it's downtime, when you get review what you've done, and ponder your next moves while pounding the keyboard.

It's a shame, and somewhat insulting to see tptacek treat these efforts many find enjoyable with so much derision. But I've spared with tptacek here, when said similar things before. Again, he confidently said something completely wrong headed, and I could not let it go. Some things don't change I guess. As a fellow at a Linux meetup said to me a long time ago, "you wrote all those words because someone was wrong on the internet???".

	▲	tptacek a day ago \| parent [-]
		I've been shipping software since we had to write it in C, send it out to be burned onto CDs, put in boxes, and put on shelves.