That's just gatekeeping.

It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now.

Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet.

But my craft was not typing. It's coding.

If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.

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kelnos 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)

	▲	light_hue_1 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Assembling code doesn't require typing. Linking doesn't require typing. Even though once upon a time both did. Claiming that this isn't coding is as absurd as saying that coding is only what you do when you hook up the wires between some vacuum tubes. The LLM is a very smart compiler. That's all. Some people want to sit and write assembly. Good for them. But asserting that unless I assemble my own code I'm not a coder is just silly.

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recursivegirth 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, there is a non-zero overlap between the VIM Andy's and AI nay-sayers.