bah9

Hard agree. My anecdotal experience: me and my friend group have math/coding contest national level background. We loved coding. All of us now devastated and consider retirement/different profession People who was there for the benefits (no offense, pretty valid reason) are happy now

I declined manager position multiple times, now I am forced to it

And no, I can't code without agents as a hobby anymore. As a rational person, I feel like this is just useless nowdays. Huge part of the fulfilment that it was the most optimal way to solve the problem. Now I feel like I do useless work

Team of software engineers also can't send rocket to the moon. I don't get your point

I obviously implied code related problems. I know agent can't change a diaper or born a child, lol

Lol what? It definitely was. Gathering requirements is not hard, it is just boring and time consuming

If it wasn't hardest part, why pay so much to swe?

What techical problems agent can't solve exactly?

Agent solve problems, you provide context

It's funny how people produce tons of code they can't even read and somehow feel like they "solved the problem". Do you feel like you built the shed when you hire carpenter and ask him to do it..?

And why school district need you when any highschooler can produce similar code..?

I think this is not "parallel universe". Selection bias: people who love to code often choose non trivial frontier work. They tend to grirf about agentic workflow the most. Myself included.

Russia will most likely migrate/mirror to asian data centers. Is it bad or good for the west? I would say bad. China would become even stronger in a long term

I cant determine whether this comment is metairony or not..?

"The goal had always been" - who's goal? Company? Employee? Humanity? I didn't get your point. I enjoyed certain type of work and now it's dead. I still can be relevant doing much less enjoyable work.

>In this context AI is nothing but good news, with proper attitude and skill it helps achieving the goal better, faster.

It is good news if you are in a lower spectrum of technical literacy. What AI did is significantly lower requirement for hard skills for problem solving. Before AI gap between smart and experienced dev and smart junior was gigantic, not it is almost non-existing. If you consider yourself good programmer, you are now way less valuable

>we need understanding of the tech-stack atleast in general

Yes, but i am ~10 years beyond that point. I have solid computer science background, and i feel like anything above that now waste of my time, because i can just ask LLM and apply my fundamental cs knowledge. It might sounds fun for someone, but for me it is not challenging

I am MLOps in a big tech company. My work is tightly coupled with training and online inferencing SOTA LLM's. Doesn't change anything in the equation

Came to the same conclusion as your point number one. Yes, i don't love my job anymore. It is painful, but... most of the people living like this their whole life and i was blessed to do what i love. And i still have well paying job, so i can retire earlier

Sadly, I am not. But I enjoy manual labor. I am leaning towards construction/electrics. But most likely just wait couple more years and retire with enough money to never work again

The irony is, my work is to train frontier llm's, so my own "child" killed my lifelong passion

Thanks!

What did you found for yourself?

What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living

All code has no worth, any code can be replicated in a short amount of time. Only ideas is valuable. Not saying it is bad thing, but i enjoyed opensource, and now i don't see any value in supporting my project and contributing to other's. No one care anymore.

>architecture Give me a reason why agent can't create great architecture when enough context is provided?

I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. Seems like most of them are happy to "be able to do great things without boring coding"... but gathering information and setting a task is an entirely different profession.

I'm always curious, what are those "great things" requiring deep technical knowledge and years of expertise that these visionaries can finally provide with the help of LLMs?

I almost feel ashamed/mentally ill when i am reading how everyone is happy that their true visionnaire potential is finally unlocked while i just like to solve my silly puzzles.

Ye ye, you can create tons of pretty useful software with agents nowdays and everyone who enjoyed coding are dinosaurs, i get it.

Programming was a chess for me. AI is a chess engine. For sure, i cared about winning (i.e. deliver product), but i have zero enjoyment from winning if i used a chess engine

Somehow, a lot of people can't understand me. Seems like 90% of programmers hate chess. They only enjoyed winning. Sad thing is, now every "guy bagging groceries" can win, what is exactly your value?

Nope. You can't. Expectations and deadlines aligned with code agent usage. No one let you spent x5 time coding things yourself

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"?

"but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code.

Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack

Idk. I don't feel that "projects" have any value nowadays. Firstly, you don't get any respect, people just thinking "I could prompt that too". Secondly, if anyone can do that, what's the point?

We have so much stuff coming nowdays that no one care

As i said, most of the devs never enjoyed coding. But even on their place I wouldn't be happy. Now way less qualified people can do their work.

Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier

Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution

Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it

Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority

And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it

"I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?

One thing I can't understand: why work as SWE if you don't really care about technical side, but you care about product? Managering position is much more suitable

I also don't understand why care about result if you are working in a big company and you have fixed salary. Most of the time result isn't about better user experience, but about profits for shareholders. I guess all people are different

It won't be close. And result will be better. Anyway, this is different type of work

Ah, this sounds so unfun to me. As I thought, actual "thinking" is providing context due to bad, not self sufficient, documentation

I think I am just not result driven. I like to do stuff myself, not providing info to some super intelligence to do cognitive work

This role is also require way less qualifications and cognitive ability. You need local knowledge, not fundamental knowledge: why in this exact company things the way it is. Mostly not transferable

>Now I’m addicted to architectures

But architecture creation can also be delegated to ai if you give agent enough context about functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc. Your work is to be feedback loop mechanism between people and llm, no? Please, give me encouraging examples of technical tasks that cant be delegated to ai with accurate prompting