Most of my career has been as an individual engineer, but the past few years I have been a project manager. I find this to be very much like using AI for coding.

Which also makes me refute the idea that AI coding is just another rung up on the programming abstraction ladder. Depending on how much you delegate to AI, I don't think it's really programming at all. It's project management. That's not a bad thing! But it's not really still programming.

Even just in the context of my human team, I feel less mentally engaged with the code. I don't know what everything does. (In principle, I could know, but I don't.) I see some code written in a way that differs from how I would have done it. But I'm not the one working day-in, day-out with the code. I'll ask questions, make suggestions, but I'm not going to force something unless I think it's really super important.

That said, I don't 100% like this. I enjoy programming. I enjoy computer science. I especially enjoy things more down the paths of algorithm design, Lisp, and the intersection of programming with mathematics. On my team, I do still do some programming. I could delegate it entirely, but I indulge myself and do a little bit.

I personally think that's a good path with AI too. I think we're at the point where, for many software application tasks, the programming could be entirely hands-off. Let AI do it all. But if I wish to, why not indulge in doing some myself also? Yeah, I know, I know, I'll get "left behind in the dust" and all of that. I'm not sure that I'm in that much of a hurry to churn out 50,000 lines of code a day; I'm cool with 45,100.

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jmalicki 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I find that AI allows me to get into algorithm design more, and the intersection of math and programming more, by avoiding boilerplate.

You can indulge even more by letting AI take care of the easy stuff so you can focus on the hard stuff.

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zeroonetwothree an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What happens when the AI does the hard stuff as well?

	▲	tjr 39 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As described above, I think with AI coding, our role shifts from "programmer" to "project manager", but even as a project manager, you can still choose to delegate some tasks to yourself. Whether if you want to do the hard stuff yourself, or the easy stuff, or the stuff that happens on Thursdays. It's not about what AI is capable of doing, but rather, what you choose to have it do.
	▲	jmalicki 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		SkyNet. When it can do the hard stuff, why do you think we'll still be around for project management and prompting? At that point, we are livestock.

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QuercusMax 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Here's an example from my recent experience: I've been building a bunch of mostly throwaway TUIs using AI (using Python and Rich), and a lot of the stuff just works trivially.

But there are some things where the AI just does not understand how to do proper boundary check to prevent busted layouts, and so I can either argue with it for an hour while it goes back and forth breaking the code in the process of trying to fix my layout issues - or I can just go in and fix it myself.