I enjoy coding deeply, and my feelings are not that simple.

I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.

I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.

Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.

▲ Karrot_Kream 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As I like to tell others: before my job was 70% architecture & patterns and 30% coding & algorithms. Now my job is 100% architecture & patterns. While I still spend the majority of my time on architecture & patterns, and while I enjoy this aspect more than coding and algorithms, I am still working a "different job" than I was when my hands steered the code completely.

▲ falkensmaize 4 hours ago | parent [-]

People say stuff like this all the time, but what does it actually mean? Like, isn’t the details of the code, at least at some level, part of the “architecture”? I’m so curious about what people who say this are actually making where they just sit around all day and dream up new lego structures without ever having to look at any of the bricks.

▲ Karrot_Kream 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The bricks are pretty standardized? I mean, you're not reinventing singly-linked and doubly-linked lists from first principles no? When I program I think in terms of data structures, data hierarchy, and algorithms. I want to use a queue here, a lock here, a double linked list there, an array list over here, maybe a hash dictionary with linked-list chaining for collisions. It's only a few times in my career that I built a bespoke data structure from the ground up and they were all for very hot loops and one case involved working on a lock-free algorithm.

I've done a lot of functional coding in the past (in academia, in Haskell as a hobby, and Scala for a unicorn where I was an early hire.) This probably affects how I think. But I find it quite natural to organize my code this way. After all the fundamental data structures and the hierarchies relating them are what often determine core properties of your programs such as being CPU, Memory, or IO bound.

I also work as a pretty senior engineer and my tasks before agents were usually about leading a team to implement something. I would often do the v0 implementation to make sure we met customer requirements and then take a step back and help the team scale the service up. These days the team is a lot smaller and maybe just another engineer; the agents make up the rest.

▲ retsibsi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I may have it wrong, but I think 'architecture' can include relatively low-level details: you could even design a program down to the level of what each function does, and still only be doing 'architecture', not coding, so long as you're not writing the code or specifying exactly how it should work.

▲ skydhash 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> you could even design a program down to the level of what each function does, and still only be doing 'architecture', not coding, so long as you're not writing the code or specifying exactly how it should work.

So it all wishes and prayers? no wonder software quality is down.

▲ Karrot_Kream 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We can be curious about how others approach problems or we can try to find the faults. I feel like this comment is a great example of jumping to the negativity rather than trying to understand a different perspective.

I ultimately think learning how other people structure programs is an enriching task and not one that should cause you to dig in and discredit differently-shaped approaches.

▲ skydhash an hour ago | parent [-]

> I ultimately think learning how other people structure programs is an enriching task

Learning from others is great. But there should be actually something to learn. When someone says

  so long as you're not writing the code or specifying exactly how it should work.

It means they’re not creating software. They’re just playing with randomly generating something.

A software is the recipe for some process. The code is the formal version where everything is exhaustively specified. Not thinking about the code means you’ve stopped thinking about the software somewhere and no longer can say if it’s ok or not.

	▲	Karrot_Kream 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What's the point of leaving a comment if you're not going to change your mind and they're not going to change theirs? Is it just to advocate for your position?

▲ barbazoo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Username checks out and thank you for writing out my own feelings better than I ever could have, even with AI.