Back in the early 2000s the sentiment was that IDEs were a force multiplier that was too high to ignore, and that anyone not using something akin to Visual Studio or Eclipse would be out of a job in 5 or so years. Meanwhile, 20 years later, the best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.

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malkia 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It depends where you work. In gaming, the best programmers I know might not even touch the command-line / Linux, and their "life" depens on Visual Studio... Why? Because the eco-system around Visual Studio / Windows and how game console devkits work is pretty much tied - while Playstation is some kind of BSD, and maybe Nintendo - all their proper SDKs are just for Windows and tied around Visual Studio (there are some studios that are the exceptions, but rare).

I'm sure other industries would have their similar examples. And then the best folks in my direct team (infra), much smaller - are the command-line, Linux/docker/etc. guys that use mostly VSCode.

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alephnerd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But the vast majority are still using an IDE - and I say this as someone who has adamantly used Vim with plugins for decades.

Something similar will happen with agentic workflows - those who aren't already productive with the status quo will have to eventually adopt productivity enhancing tooling.

That said, it isn't too surprising if the rate of AI adoption starts slowing down around now - agentic tooling has been around for a couple years now, so it makes sense that some amount of vendor/tool rationalization is kicking in.

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evanelias an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It remains to be seen whether these tools are actually a net enhancement to productivity, especially accounting for longer-term / bigger-picture effects -- maintainability, quality assurance, user support, liability concerns, etc.

If they do indeed provide a boost, it is clearly not very massive so far. Otherwise we'd see a huge increase in the software output of the industry: big tech would be churning out new products at a record rate, tons of startups would be reaching maturity at an insane clip in every imaginable industry, new FOSS projects would be appearing faster than ever, ditto with forks of existing projects.

Instead we're getting an overall erosion of software quality, and the vast majority of new startups appear to just be uninspired wrappers around LLMs.

	▲	alephnerd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not necessarily talking about AI code agents or AI code review (workflows which I think are difficult for agentic workflows to really show a tangible PoV against humans, but I've seen some of my portfolio companies building promising capabilities that will come out of stealth soon), but various other enhancements such as better code and documentation search, documentation generation, automating low sev ticket triage, low sev customer support, etc. In those workflows and cases where margins and dollar value provided is low, I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where possible. Even reaching this point was unimaginable 5 years ago, and is enough to show workflow and dollar value for teams. To use another analogy, using StackOverflow or Googling was viewed derisively by neckbeards who constantly spammed RTFD back in the day, but now no developer can succeed without being able to be a proficient searcher. And a major value that IDEs provided in comparison to traditional editors was that kind of recommendation capability along with code quality/linting tooling. Concentrating on abstract tasks where the ability to benchmark between human and artificial intelligence is difficult means concentrating on the trees while missing the forest. I don't foresee codegen tools replacing experienced developers but I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.

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lmf4lol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think no one can predict what will happen. We need to wait until we can empirically observe who will be more productive on certain tasks.

Thats why I started with AI coding. I wanted to hedge against the possibility that this takes off and I am useless. But it made me sad as hell and so I just said: Screw it. If this is the future, I will NOT participate.

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seanmcdirmid 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

That’s fine, but you don’t want to be blind sided by changes in the industry. If it’s not for you, have a plan B career lined up so you can still put food on the table. Also, if you are good at old fashioned SE and AI, you’ll be OK either way.

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