Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudgery inform me on what to do differently next time in a way I worry I would not appreciate otherwise, were specific tools thrust upon me.

I remain because I remain hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way someday.

Wanted to chime in that, at my job, hand-writing code has been massively helpful when debugging it. My mental model of what can go wrong is much easier to form if I wrote the code. A LLM will not always be able to solve these incidents, no matter how many logs you throw at it.

That’s why I laugh when people are like “oh, AI writes all the tests, it’s so much easier.” If your code is hard to test, you need to change the abstraction or the interface. Tests are the first reuse of your code, so if it’s a pain to use in tests, it’s going to be terrible to use in general.

Completely resonate with this. There don't seem to be many of us, at least in my online bubble, but you're not alone.

I believe and hope eventually we'll come around to valuing people who have put in the work - not just to understand and review output but to make choices themselves and keep their knowledge and judgement sharp - when we fully realize the cost of not doing so.

Yes! I love to code. I love the entire process end-to-end. I love doing all the things people say they prefer to hand off to LLMs. Makes me sad to see all the people allowing corporations to slowly rob them of all the little joys this field has to offer.

Well said.

I've found that I reach for Copilot most often when working on frontend javascript code. Will the incentive to improve the frontend libraries, browser standards, etc vanish now that LLMs let us avoid some of this pain?

Especially true for junior-mid engineers. The brain stores and comprehends what you tend to repeat.

If I don't solve math problems I won't understand how to solve them, no matter how many times I see videos of people solving similar problems. This is what LLM usage early on will ultimately lead to, and anyone who will claim "oh, by the time I'll be senior the LLM's will be much better than me" only proves my point.

I love your take <3

I continue to do all of those things but have Claude do the typing for me, if that makes any sense. I'm directing it on almost a line by line basis, I just am not that interested in doing syntax pushups anymore.

>The callouses matter. The tedium matters.

Yeah nicely said.