[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it.

With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

> With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code.

Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?

You switch difficulties, like you do in a game. Play on Hard or Survival mode now. Build greater and more amazing things than you ever did before.

We have never, ever, written what the machine executes, even assembly is an abstraction, even in a hex editor. So we all settle for the level of abstraction we like to work at. When we started (those of our age) most of us were assembly (or BASIC) programmers and over time we either increased our level of abstraction or didn't. If you went from assembly -> C -> Java/Python you moved up levels of abstraction. We're not writing in Python or C now, we are writing in natural language and that is compiled to our programming languages. It's just the compiler is still a bit buggy and opinionated!! And yes for some low level coding you still want to check the assembly language, some things need that level of attention.

I learn more in a day coding with AI than I would in a month without it, it's a wonderful two-way exchange, I suggest directions, it teaches me new libraries or techniques that might solve the problem. I lookup those solutions and learn more about my problem space. I feel more like a university student some days than a programmer.

Eventually this will probably be the end of coding and even analytical work. But I think that part is still far off (and possibly longer than we'll still be working for) in the meantime actually this for me is as exciting as the early days of home computing. It won't be fun for ever, the Internet was the coolest thing ever, until it wasn't, but doesn't mean we can't enjoy the summer while it's summer.

>With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them.

That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.

I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.

but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?

If so, other sites beckon.