To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses.
I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard.
Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.
I enjoy solving interesting problems in software. But when I was doing it for a living, the majority of my work was pretty tedious. I'd have been thrilled to turn over that part to AI and spend all my time doing the interesting stuff.
Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day.
I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions.
I'm surprised you've had three replies so far that didn't notice your sarcasm.
But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them better, because each one provided so much more value.
When the machines are able to do the hard stuff better than humans, that's when we'll really be in trouble.
I do not believe that past performance is a guarantee of future results. The era of well paid programmers in great demand is pretty much over, and it’s not only because of AI. Even if machines are dumb enough they require supervision, the big bosses do not care and will always prefer the dumb machine if it saves them money vs hiring a junior dev. It means the poor sods that supervise these machines will have to work harder to keep up with demand.
Maybe that'll happen one day, but it hasn't so far. As of this month, Glassdoor reports the median total pay for software developers across all industries and experience levels as $149K.
This but unironically. We're at a point where there is still a gap between what managers expect and how fast AI can work. I genuinely do have days where I finish a few tickets and I'm done.
Can't imagine you really think "the market forces" all point toward a utopia for the workers? We're all just gonna get paid for 2 hours of work a day and post pics from the beach with a special shout-out to Claude?
There are way fewer challenging problems that people are willing to pay me to solve.
Sure I would love to be working on some cutting edge challenging stuff, but the reality is it has been much more realistic to do the tedious stuff for pay instead
Absolutely everything about it in equal measure? You live environment config, setting up test harnesses, coding the complex part all identically the same? Nothing you would hand off?
Do you find there are zero chores in software development and everything is an identical delight?
Woodworking analogy for AI is not "power tools vs handsaw", its "power tools vs. wood 3D printer". You don't do any of the creating, you only ideate and allow the machine to do all the creating. It's simply not wood working anymore. Its something else entirely
I cannot choose entirely hand-made code, I don't think I'll even be able to choose 50% hand-made code, because my manager will say "why aren't you just using the 3D Wood Printer 9000? Jeff is building house frames 5x faster than you, you need to get with the program or we're gonna let you go"
So what? If I want a cabinet I care about the final product. power tools, 3d printer, I don't care. If it means it gets done faster and cheaper and is good enough for my needs, then that's what I want. Someone else is free to pay for the costly artisanal approach if they want to.
A friend was recently redoing his kitchen. They hired a carpenter for cabinetry, and his wife asked him if he would be willing to make it with only hand tools.
Carpenter told her he'd be happy to, it would take 8 weeks longer, cost more, and probably wouldn't look any better than the regular way
Do you want to eat good food or make good food? Is doing the dishes something you hand to a machine or do you always do it by hand? Are there any ingredients you buy pre-made (pesto, curry pastes, do you make your own panko breadcrumbs)?
My point, which you seem to have missed, is that people have an intrinsic incentive to care about learning to cook because eating is something we have to do every single day regardless
Thread seems to be saying LLMs are great because they do the dirty work and leave the fun work to humans. The counter-point is not exactly that LLMs aren't capable of doing dirty-work, it's that the nature of work isn't going to split so cleanly.
And cooking is a good example. Cooking is work. And slop. And it's also incredibly rewarding and creative, if you want it to be. Robots can help along that entire journey.
Maybe this is the core point: "cooking is a solved problem" that's how engineers always think. Except it's not. And 100% automation is still not going to break that discussion so cleanly.
The comment I was responding to was looking at a state where we looked at markdown files instead of programming, my point was to agree with the original quote that they can remove the drudgery.
> Maybe this is the core point: "cooking is a solved problem" that's how engineers always think.
But it isn’t, that’s a lazy stereotype of a subset.
Gotcha. the engineer generalization was to plant a stake in the ground. I do hear that quite often, especially from higher titled engineers. in any case, definitely admit it's not all of them, and perhaps it's even a vocal minority that i'm better served to intentionally work to expand my influences.
But you don't actually do any of that, do you? Instead, you get tired and lazy and attempt to have the LLM solve those hard problems for you too. You just don't tell others about it.
What an odd bit of moralizing. GP said they enjoy doing the hard parts, in which case they probably do them, because it's fun. If they actually don't enjoy it, there's nothing wrong with them using the LLM, when it's up to the task, and then just checking to make sure the code is good.
I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard.
Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.