Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you?

The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems.

I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though. They are occasionally useful when working with popular APIs you use very rarely, or when you need to write some very repetitive code. Other than that, I feel like it's mostly a monkey typing plausible but incorrect code on my screen everywhere I go.

Why spend your life doing _anything_ a computer could do for you? Why even live, if you're going in that philosophical direction?

I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though.

Unfortunately, many of those in management already think it is.

The less people use their brains, the more easily they will be replaced, and the worse the product they'll produce. Unless you want to lose your job and let society drown in mediocre software (which you will no doubt need to use), do not hand over your agency to the machine.

The latter gives me dopamine. The former gives me carpal tunnel.

The typing is the rhyme scheme. The algorithm is the rhythm.

Right, which is exactly why autocomplete is not a huge help.

I've only found it truly useful in a codebase, language, or library I'm unfamiliar with or haven't touched in a long time.

It doesn't do much for me most of the time as I'm usually thinking or walking around the code, but the codebases I'm in usually are extremely easy to jump around in with fzf.

Properly naming functions/classes/modules goes a long way.

Back in the 2000s for me part of that job was to lead the buildout of a data center with a SAN that took up a whole room to hold 4TBs. Now I do that with 5 lines of yaml in a CloudFormation template.

My job was not “automated out of existence” by not having to provision a data center as part of it.