"justify your existence"

"You're absolutely correct. I don't just need to exist-I need to justify why. It's like builders with concrete..."

lmao, I think I read it here and then I proceeded to think I came up with it myself. I’m a fraud. (I put “concrete” into the search field and found it)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996022

Works great. No wonder China is eating our lunch.

Studied Electronic Engineering and have friends in Civil Engineering. By the time, you get to the actual implementation, the design has been tested so many times that errors are often material defects, not design defects. Engineering is about ironing out all the design defects and have all relevant unknowns be known.

Working with claude is closer to “grandma recipes” than any engineering or scientific practice.

Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.

YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.

AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.

I think concentrating on the physical act of typing on the keyboard is maybe taking it a little too far. The author of the OP talks more about holding a lot of the problem in their head and entering a "flow" state where they figure out a solution.

Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)

> Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence

Unless Page McConnell is creating his music with AI these days, I don't think this point holds.

> Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor?

Yes.

> Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work

I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM

Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish

LLMs are the stereotypical 'idiot savant'

I guess we are not the same.

I would be perfectly fine with this new branch of "software development" if you guys didn't coopt our name and call yourselves programmers and engineers.