If they can take away your feelings of what being human is so easily then you should have taken care to develop it better.

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.

I'm curious, is your database work all hand-coded? Tidesdb is extremely impressive in any case, and I just saw Turborel which looks interesting. Your commit rate is pretty intense -- speaking as a hand-coding dinosaur myself, if this is all by hand too I'm now even more impressed (and a bit jealous for your level of productivity!)

Thank you, also less and less which is what scares me.

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.

I would blame society, yes.

People need to reflect and find themselves instead of relying to their own automaticity to get them through life, stop and smell the flowers a little.

I have a hard time understanding that position when it comes to programming. What is "human" about typing instructions for the computer into a terminal? Was perforating paper more human?

When it comes to generative art, yes, that's a much more significant issue.

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.

Yeah, I used to get a kick out of building a perfect, performant, keyboard-accessible, a11y compliant and well-designed dropdown. It was great.

Now I get the same feeling out of building an entire component library in an afternoon, running my code in a Nintendo Wii with twenty minutes of effort, hacking an OEM LED display, my keyboard firmware, or building projects that would take a team of twenty engineers in the past. We just got a power upgrade.

This reads like "I used to enjoy making a home cooked meal for my family, but now I can buy ten off doordash in the same time".

in the end it's just sad.

If we're going with cooking analogies - I really enjoy it, cook daily, yet a rice cooker was one of the best purchases I've ever made. That's a better parallel to me.

A rice cooker? Is this a joke? Making white rice takes 10 minutes with a pot. Very confusing.

I know right? Yet, what I said is true, and you can ask anyone who owns one for japanese/korean/chinese cooking. It reduces effort to near zero while giving 100% consistent results.

The point though, is that I don’t feel “sad” about not having controlled the temperature and time myself. It’s a tool.

I thought the same thing until I got a rice cooker. It makes cooking a little less stressful while you make the rest of your meal. I eat rice once every 1-2 weeks and I still love it.

Ah, yes, because just like a rice cooker, the work takes the same amount of time, it's just using less space on the stove, and is more reliable.

Wait, no, a rice cooker doesn't seem to fit.

Nobody is stopping you from home cooking however you want.

Working in a commercial kitchen however is a different matter. But there again, nobody is forcing you to use LLMs. Cook however you want.

> But there again, nobody is forcing you to use LLMs.

In the sense that I can quit my job at any time, sure. But my employer certainly requires LLM use, and even if I found another position that doesn't, I have no reason to believe that will last.

This is the commercial kitchen part of the analogy. Either you work in someone else kitchen based on their rules. Or start your own kitchen and you set the rules.

I am not denying the lack of freedom when working for someone else, or that it sucks when they impose rules on you. But that’s always been the way it goes.

The comment I replied to was about home projects and home cooking. Nothing there has to change.

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?

Putting a shelf up is not fun. Designing, building the shelf from scratch with my own vision feels way better ;). It's a lot more of a hassle but you will always look at it and be like I did that. It's easy to go to the store, buy something and assemble it.

I think this perspective comes from assuming that the LLM is doing the thinking for you. And that is not the right approach IMO. The code is still mine - I chose how to write it, I suggested improvements, picked the architecture, directed refactoring and benchmarking efforts, improved tooling, scope of tests, and so on.

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.

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?

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.

I'd say they took the inhumane parts of being a programmer away and people who spend 30 years turning themselves into robots don't know what tondo with themselves now.

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.

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.

I feel like LLMs are akin to a performance enhancing drug that's gained mainstream acceptance.

Everyone can run a 5 minute mile now without training. I used to like training to be able to do that, but now that it's accepted everyone can do it for free (and people don't care if you did it the hard way) the joy has been sucked out of it a bit.

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

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.

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.

I think you grossly misunderstood my point. Just saying the hobby side of it is less fun because the effort part of it feels more pointless.

I guess I don’t understand the motivation you have for perusing your hobbies.

To me, the effort part only feels pointless if you want to accept LLM-derived code as comparable. Any marathon run is pointless, you go in a loop and we have cars. The point is to do the run yourself unaided.

That a computer can play a virtual instrument better than me (and continuously better than anyone) has little bearing on whether or not I continue practicing on my piano.

The world at large does accept LLM-derived code as comparable. The same cannot be said for driving v. running 26 miles.

I think the analogies are not helping us. This started by comparing LLMs to performance enhancing drug being used within the same sport.

But software engineer, as a job rather than a hobby, has always been about results. Hence my original point.

Hence my confusion. I am not perusing my hobbies for “the world at large” I’m perusing them for myself; being able to drive 26 miles makes no difference to me nor to the others who wish to run it.

I think most people derive joy from hobbies because they get a unique skill as a result of time invested. If the Philadelphia marathon started giving out medals to people who drive the course in a car, I think less people would want to run it.

I agree, but they would move on to another marathon that didn’t hand out prizes to drivers.

People who continue to do the hobby without LLMs will still get unique skills, like woodworkers who don’t use power tools.

I understand that this is a loss for those who were pursuing programming as a hobby only as long as it gave them a unique skill and made them feel superior to others. However, for better or worse, I can’t bring myself to care about that.

Not sure how you got the 'made them feel superior' part.

I’m not sure what other implication there is.

Hobby programming without LLMs and you gain unique skills (you can do the work without power tools).

Hobby program with LLMs, you gain unique skills again (you learn how to properly use these models and get to quickly iterate on your design skills). Regardless of what the big labs are saying, there is still a lot of skill involved in creating with them; if only because they don’t read minds so you have the get good at describing your taste and requirements.

My point is in the former case, if the skill feels less useful, it just feels less fun. It's not a 'better than' thing.

I guess I fundamentally disagree with that being a good metric by which to pick hobbies. I am not picking mine based on some economic expected value calculation, it's whether or not I enjoy doing the activity for its own sake.

I guess it's hard to express over text, it's not an economic value thing, it's about being able to cultivate a unique and useful skill.

As an illustrator/animator who codes as a hobby and to produce games that are mostly just making that art interactive. I feel like AI is taking over my humanity when it’s doing any visual art or design work. But when it does code. I care much less and am just happy that I reach my goals faster. This is very personal and I completely understand that if coding is your main thing, code by genAI feels worse. I do fear for the future… At least coders have been able to save some money. Visual artists are mostly broke.

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.