Sigh agents keep killing all the passion I have for programming. It can do things way faster than me, and better than me in some cases. Soon it will do everything better and faster than me.

> Soon it will do everything better and faster than me

There is no evidence of that coming from this post. The work was highly directly by an extremely skilled engineer. As he points out, it was small chunks. What chunks and in what order were his decision.

Is AI re-writing those chunks much faster than he could. Yes. Very much so. Is it doing it better? Probably not. So, it is mostly just faster when you are very specific about what it should do. In other words, it is not a competitor. It is a tool.

And the entire thing was constrained by a massive test suite. AI did not write that. It does not even understand why those tests are the way they are.

This is a long way from "AI, write me a JavaScript engine".

Is a migration from language X to Y or refactoring from pattern A to B really the kind of task that makes you look forward to your day when you wake up?

Personally my sweet spot for LLM usage is for such tasks, and they can do a much better job unpacking the prompt and getting it done quickly.

In fact, there's a few codebases at my workplace that are quite shit, and I'm looking forward to make my proposal to refactor these. Prior to LLMs, I'm sure I'd have been laughed off, but now it's much more practical to achieve this.

It's the opposite for me, most of the time it's first rough pass it generates is awful and if you don't have good taste and a solid background of years of experience programming you won't notice it and I keep having to tell it to steer into better design choices.

I'm not sure 25,000 lines translated in 2 weeks is "fast", for a naive translation between languages as similar as C++ and Rust (and Ladybird does modern RAII smart-pointer-y C++ which is VERY similar to Rust). You should easily be able to do 2000+ lines/day chunks.

"I will never be a world class athlete, so I play for the love of the sport."

Helps me.

Not sure why you'd get that from this post, which says it required careful small prompts over the course of weeks.

In the hands of experienced devs, AI increases coding speed with minimal impact to quality. That's your differentiator.

Look into platforms like Workato, Boomi, or similar iPaaS products, unfortunely it feels like those of us that like coding have to be happy turning into architect roles, with AI as brick layers.

Despite the many claims to the contrary, agents can't do anything better than a human yet. Faster, certainly, but the quality is always poor compared to what a human would produce. You aren't obsolete yet, brother.

It automates both the fun and the boring parts equally well. Now the job is like opening a box of legos and they fall out and then auto-assemble themselves into whatever we want..