Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.

Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?

If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.

I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.

I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.

God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.

The future is exciting.

Bring it.

I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints.

I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.

What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.

Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation.

> The future is exciting.

Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement

I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.

> I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games.

Then make them. What's stopping you?

Burn the planet to the ground because your life is boring. Extremely mature stance you've got there

> If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

To go off the deep end… I actually think this LLM assistant stuff is a precondition to space exploration. I can see the need for a offline compressed corpus of all human knowledge that can do tasks and augment the humans aboard the ship. You’ll need it because the latency back to earth is a killer even for a “simple” interplanetary trip to mars—that is 4 to 24 minutes round trip! Hell even the moon has enough latency to be annoying.

Granted right now the hardware requirements and rapid evolution make it infeasible to really “install it” on some beefcake system but I’m almost positive the general form of moores law will kick in and we’ll have SOTA models on our phones in no time. These things will be pervasive and we will rely on them heavily while out in space and on other planets for every conceivable random task.

They’ll have to function reliably offline (no web search) which means they probably need to be absolutely massive models. We’ll have to find ways to selectively compress knowledge. For example we might allocate more of the model weights to STEM topics and perhaps less to, I dunno, the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek gods or the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. But perhaps not, because who knows—-maybe a deep familiarity with Bio-Dome is what saves the colony on Kepler-452b

Oh, no, you're imagining the wrong subgenre of sci-fi. These robots are actually owned and operated by billionaires.