> People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive.

I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.

I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.

I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.

> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?

It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.

I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.

Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.

Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.

And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.

Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript. And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.

I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.

The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.

For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.