What I fear is the future career path for manual programming is fixing AI generated systems. I suspect it will pay very well because you will be finding and fixing things the AI driven work can't. It is going to be soul destroying as reading AI code is deeply unpleasant in the same way reading the articles is.

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huurtehoog a day ago | parent | next [-]

I never go by pay. I won't fix bad systems whatever their provenance because trying to understand poorly coded software is very unpleasant.

I go by interesting problems and I like being able to chose from more options due to lessened expertise competition. Why people voluntarily renounce expertise is beyond me, but they are and I welcome the increase in choices of engagement I have been experiencing.

I would never engage in uninteresting work at any rate of pay, and working with LLM output directly or mediated is quite uninteresting to me.

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sanderjd 17 hours ago | parent [-]

It's the domains, the problems being solved, that are interesting, not the lines of code. I want to have expertise in the former, not the latter.

	▲	huurtehoog 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The code is ultimately the codification (ha!) of domain knowledge in precise, non-ambiguous ways. It has extrinsic, non essential complexity yes. But including ever more complexity in the process, by depending on complexity-slinger systems that you don't fully control or even understand, is not the solution, in my view. If you lose control over the precise, detailed specification of the domain knowledge that the code is, ultimately you are just a glorified business analyst. Besides, the inherent complexity of the implementation is not without essential complexity that needs mastering for security and performance reasons. Deferring that mastery to some tool is self defeating. The complexity doesn't disappear. You're just shuffling it around and when it leaves your purview you are merely creating opportunity for someone else to capture that value. Ultimately yeah the vision of being an LLM jockey who doesn't know code might be viable or even numerically dominant in the market in future. Why would you descend the value chain though, and voluntarily, that I don't understand. Competing for volume isn't historically in the interest of the autonomous worker. Maybe I'd feel differently about it if I owned capital and had some corporate strategy behind it. As an independent actor, I don't see it favoring me.

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sanderjd 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI is a very useful tool for finding problems in codebases.

I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM based tooling" seems pretty unlikely.