I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either because:

a) They asked an LLM

b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"

c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer

d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]

True story:

In one of our recent Enterprise Architecture meetings, I was lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt, and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by a so-called Senior Developer, in an Enterprise Architecture meeting.

▲ abraxas 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Was he entirely wrong? Have you tried to dump the stored proc into a frontier model and ask it to refactor? You'd probably have neat 20 stored procs with well laid out logic in minutes.

I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming increasingly trivial.

	▲	ilitirit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Was he entirely wrong? Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone through this process with multiple LLMs, from various perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if products existed that could help with this. That lead me down a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory reporting of a completely different nature which was effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended up doing. Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was obviously absurd: - He had never seen the SP - He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting - He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives - He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL and ANSI SQL - No consideration given to IP - etc etc Those are the basics. Let's jump a little bit into the detail. Here's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like: `SELECT CASE WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221' WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011' END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region] -- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....` Yes, that's a typical column name that has rotted over time, so noone even knows if it's still correct. Yes, those are typical CASE statements (170+ of them at last count, and no, they are not all equal or symmetric). So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the business rules either. So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.