Not OP, but all the choices made along the way are the human part. The understanding and creativity to solve the complex challenges that arise in an efficient way that fits into the structure of the greater program.

Programming never has had one right way to accomplish a task, and that is disappearing with agents. Why would pick Ruby for a project because it’s nice for the programmer, when the agent is the one coding? In fact, Why would anyone ask an LLM to write a new program in almost anything other than JavaScript and Rust?

Have you ever solved a problem with code? If you have, you will know why it hurts so bad to lose that ah-ha moment at that level. It's something special spending a long time on something, learning as you do it. I do understand you can get this through possibly an LLM, just different. Take a mathematician spending years on a problem. Seeing a computer do it in a matter of a second or "11 days", is devastating in a way.

Code can be art too. There are many ways to solve problems but finding this easy and elegant way which is just beautiful is marvelous.

Downgrading programming to typing instructions is like downgrading mathematics to writing characters.

This is not an issue.

Nobody cares about typing instructions. If someone can click instructions or voice them, it all the same.

Programming is about finding the right instructions. Not about typing.

assuming you yourself had programmed pre-LLM i completely fail to relate to your lived experience. what a devastatingly sad way of viewing the world

setting aside the craft and mastery or satisfaction in goal accomplishment: to me the main thing is a sense of actualization, of the codebase or thing you were working on being better because you were there.

have you ever put up a shelf? did it feel good after?

If you were good with money hah!!

What will be the purpose of a graphic designer when Google can generate you a logo, endless combinations. Devastating to me.

I've seen it first hand, it's pretty mind blowing and rather scary. You can't not feel that way after some time. The hype disappears.

Very much so. I feel like LLMs are even greater force than something like "steroids" which in the end are deadly if abused.

Except performance enhancing drugs are banned from sports because that’s how they want it to be played (it has nothing to do with safety, look at non drugs like the LZR Racer swim suit).

If you wish to make software engineering your job then it stops being a game where we ban things simply because they provide an “unfair” advantage.

If you wish to play at programming “the way it used to be done” then by all means go ahead. But mixing methapors between sports and work is not helpful.

It's more like they are being carried in the arms of a big robot who is doing the running for them, but everyone has somehow agreed to say that the human "ran" a five-minute mile because they ordered the robot where to run.

Oh I'm fine but people around me aren't and that's from accountants, to writers, to artists(music, drawing, animating), look around you. I'm the kind of person who doesn't buy bread, I bake everything from scratch, AI won't take a lot away from me, I'm a lover and creator. I do worry though, it may take everything in a way eventually, that's the sad part if you think far enough into the future.

Lots of people define themselves by their work. Might be able to indict that. Or that society made that a viable or indeed encouraged option.

Programmers were just the first shoe to drop. The same is now coming for the entry-level engineers as agents learn cad programming which has the same complexity barrier to entry.

We will soon trade that complexity barrier over to the agents and we won’t know how it is done, because the agents always did it for us.

That's a pretty funny take but you need to zoom out and look at other white collar occupations and then blue collar that will be cheaper to automate.