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Maybe.

But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt. It kind of strikes me as similar to the hubris of calling the Titanic "unsinkable." It's an untested claim with potentially disastrous consequences.

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> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt.

It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.

Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)

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Companies aren't evaluating on "keeping an eye on technical debt", but then ARE directly evaluating on whether you use AI tools.

Meanwhile they are hollowing out work forces based on those metrics.

If we make doing the right thing career limiting this all gets rather messy rather quickly.

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Tests make me faster. Dynamic or not feels irrelevant when I consider how much slower I’d be without the fast feedback loop of tests.
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Static type checking is even faster than running the code. It doesn't catch everything, but if finding a type error in a fast test is good, then finding it before running any tests seems like it would be even better.
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Oh I'm well aware of this. I admitted defeat in a way.. I can't compete. I'm just at loss, and unless LLM stall and break for some reason (ai bubble, enshittification..) I don't see a future for me in "software" in a few years.
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Somehow I appreciate this type of attitude more than the one which reflects total denial of the current trajectory. Fervent denial and AI trash-talking being maybe the single most dominant sentiment on HN over the last year, by all means interspersed with a fair amount of amazement at our new toys.

But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.

But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.

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I get crazy over the 'engineer are not paid to write loc', nobody is sad because they don't have to type anymore. My two issues are it levels the delivery game, for the average web app, anybody can now output something acceptable, and then it doesn't help me conceptualize solution better, so I revert to letting it produce stuff that is not maleable enough.
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If the world comes to that it will be absolutely catastrophic, and it’s a failure of grappling with the implications that many of the executives of AI companies think you can paper over the social upheaval with some UBI. There will be no controlling what happens, and you don’t even need to believe in some malicious autonomous AI to see that.
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I feel the same.

Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.

I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.

I am glad I am not younger.

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Yep, its a rather depressing realization isnt it. Oh well, life moves on i suppose.

I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.

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i'm sorry if I pulled everybody down .. but it's been many months since gemini and claude became solid tools, and regularly i have this strong gut feeling. i tried reevaluating my perception of my work, goals, value .. but i keep going back to nope.
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