This view is defeatist, and one hundred percent correct. The programming profession as we once knew it no longer exists. Artisanal programmers will soon occupy the same niche that Emacs users did in the past (with the occasional "Why I still code by hand" blog post). The greybeards will gradually fade away, while new code generators (human or artificial) will get the job done, with no regard for how things were done just two or three years ago.

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chasd00 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My son brought up a good analogy using blacksmiths. They use to be the experts in manufacturing tools and other useful things then factories came along and at first the quality and output wasn't that great. Factories started improving and pretty soon no one needed blacksmiths and no blacksmith could match the output of a factory. When the blacksmiths weren't getting any work people would probaly say "well go work for the factory" to which a blacksmith would reply "but a blacksmith is who i am, i don't want to just pull a lever and push a button and out comes a part. How can you truly know it was made with care unless i do it myself by hand?".

I thought it was a pretty insightful point coming from a 16 year old boy (being a former 16 year old boy myself).

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catdog 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "but a blacksmith is who i am, i don't want to just pull a lever and push a button and out comes a part. How can you truly know it was made with care unless i do it myself by hand?".

I think this is the place where a lot of "coders" are now, they only cared about the manual part of the job which is gone.

What's different in software is that developing software always kinda was building and designing factories spitting out copies at the end (while actually creating and distributing the copy increasingly being the easy part). So in this profession you have a split between people who were actually only in for the manual part of building the factory while you have others for whom the manual part always was just a means to an end. With the purely manual part gone there is still a shitton of work left which is in the end a lot more complex and challenging than mere button pushing but it's different work.

	▲	drewbeck 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> they only cared about the manual part of the job I think this is a very small part of the population, if anybody. Craftspeople, perhaps definitionally, are people who care about the work of making AND the results. This is true for many many devs.
	▲	skydhash an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I think this is the place where a lot of "coders" are now, they only cared about the manual part of the job which is gone. That argument has been repeated so much while all the experienced developers keep saying that coding was not the hardest part of the job. The hardest part was adding the new changes while ensuring the system doesn't break and that it's still easy to modify later. In the latter case, intuition plays a big role into labeling what is a core truth of the system (unlikely to change) and what is a transitory need. Coding was just something you do (and relax while doing so), not something you put your whole being into. When I code, I mostly think about the system. Which is why I look at the docs and my notes often to check the semantics of whatever symbols I want to use. I don't think about the actual typing of the code. That's the actual argument against agentic coding. No one is checking semantics, it's hope and prayers that the software is correct.

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win311fwg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> no one needed blacksmiths

But they do still need the job shop machinist which fill essentially the same niche using slightly different tools (mills and lathes rather than forges and hammers). Is your 16 year old implying that LLMs are the programming equivalent of a mill/lathe in metal working?