I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.

Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.

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happytoexplain an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

	▲	snohobro an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use. However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to. It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch. I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there. But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.

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rubikscube09 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?

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searls 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.

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zelphirkalt 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they haven't worked a day in their life before, then who has built all the software products we use today and from which LLMs are endlessly benefitting?

	▲	rubikscube09 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		when i say haven't worked a day in their life, I mean it in terms of the aphorism "if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life".

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Verdex 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Speaking for myself. Not really. The problem that I had with enjoying programming was that many of my coworkers who didn't enjoy programming have some opinions that were frustrating to need to entertain.

Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.

In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.

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cptroot 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think your comment is very well thought out. It seems to me your conclusion argues against your topic sentence.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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