Off topic, but I remember fondly the pre-LLM days when I used to love reading about programming languages. I never got a chance to professionally work with Rust, but made some cool hobby projects with it. Would have eventually tried out zig too.

Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.

I relate to this.

For years I used Rust as my hobby-programming language and loved it greatly. I never managed to land a job working with it full-time, because either the work was too niche or it didn't pay enough, or I was simply too comfortable where I was to change. And now that I finally have enough discretion over my technology choices to run a "proper" project using whatever tools and languages I want, it is not me but the AI that writes all of the code.

There's a part of me that feels a quite sad about all this. It's almost as if there actually all along existed a real final deadline on finding that "dream job". And I missed it. And while I expect this one miss to be just a small piece in the grand picture of things that we're going to lose or have already lost to the zeitgeist of agentic SWE, it feels big to me. It was my professional dream, while I still had professional dreams.

I think (for now), it is still relevant. A language is an abstraction, and a good abstraction, like a good LLM harness, can be quite valuable.

Let’s say I’m writing some concurrent code with an LLM. I’d probably feel much safer having it write Rust, rather than C. So even in a post-LLM world, languages will continue to evolve as long as abstractions can be improved.

I was thinking about that too recently. We have a new service that we’re trying to publish an SDK for. I don’t like the SDK that was created and kept nitpicking about how verbose certain things are and how “unergonomic” it feels (long tedious type names, annoying redundant constructs, etc) But then I was wondering if for a brand new service/SDK if anyone cares anymore and how much fuss i should be making about that.

> Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.

Programming and learning new things can still be fun in the era of agentic coding.

With LLMs, I get to quicky ask: what would this look like? Why do it that way? If you suspect that the LLM isn't doing it the right way, you can still investigate that yourself.

e.g. the other day, https://rhombus-lang.org/ was mentioned on HN. With LLMs, the cost for trying this out is practically much lower.

> Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.

In 5-10 years, the people who have paid attention to these will be needed to bail us out of the mess that the rest of the slop-addled monke brains have created.

I used Rust extensively pre-LLM, and I'm much happier to serialize my thoughts to Rust than any other language.

I prefer to prototype in Golang since it compiles fast and makes for quick iteration, but at the end I ask the LLM to port the Golang to Rust.

Nice Rust enums for APIs are the chef's kiss.

I absolutely will not write anything in Python or scripting languages anymore. They're too brittle and don't have great devex or deployment stories. Especially when you can just as easily build in a typesafe language with good error handling that compiles down to a single static binary.