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It is sad. I like programming, if I couldn't do it and had to write text (which I do hate, I'm not a writer) it would be make quite a sad world.
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Of course you can always program by hand, no one is stopping you.
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Not sure this is true for all of us. I bet many/some (unsure here) are told to use ai for their daily programming tasks.
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Plenty of companies are forcing the use of AI to people.
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How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?
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How do you justify your salary given that you're just using OSS compiler/editor any of us could use for free in your role ?

AI just changed how I edit code - I still see coworkers (senior developers) failing with Claude/Codex and get stuck when there are trivial solutions if you understand the full problem space. Right now AI is just a productivity tool.

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How do you justify your salary given that you sit in a chair all day, likely making the world worse, and make 5x as much as someone saving lives, building houses, or teaching kids how to read?
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Supply and demand. Not many people are good at programming and it's highly in demand.

The question is how many people will be good at vibe coding? If the answer is "lots" then we can definitely expect programming salaries to return to "normal" levels. His question is very relevant; you can't dismiss it as easily as that.

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it can be easily dismissed because "anyone can use the tool that costs $20" makes no meaningful sense.

this was always true in fact $20 is more than the free it costs for notepad++

it's a flippant statement. Go down the line of any tool; it's cost has basically nothing to do with skill difference to operate it. See basically everything. There's levels.

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Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.
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> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job

But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...

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To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.
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I agree with this. I feel like there’s a false dichotomy right now in a lot of these discussions where one can only vibe code or only code by hand. It is possible to do both…
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Which episode ?
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Someone competent using them is today a requirement and for awhile will make the marginal utility of skilled workers greater than that of unskilled. The justification is that they are much more productive than they were before.
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You can build things quickly with AI, but you can’t delegate your responsibilities to AI. Once the AI starts struggling, you’ll need to takeover and figure it out.
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I don't think you understand how programming as a job works, writing code is the final output of the process but it's not the job in itself.
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They're using a tool that anyone can use for $20 an hour, sure. But that's not what they're "just" doing. This is what is so insane about non-technical people talking about code - writing the actual syntax is not really the hard part.

What you're saying is like "how do you justify your salary as a NASA engineer when anyone can use Simulink and generate the code?"

It is extremely ignorant.

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There is no good justification for anyone's salary really, except perhaps doctors and underwater welders.
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no engineers on staff and stakeholders think the company is incompetent

Coinbase is paying the price for that for every UX glitch, after the CEO was gleeful about HR personnel shipping production code

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They don't need to justify it!
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Because the tool will happily give you a "solution" that kinda works for a few inputs. It will happily correct itself when you give it more incorrect tests.

It will almost never converge on the general solution that will pass tests you haven't given it yet.

This is why AI is sooo good at Javascript and related slop. A solution that "kinda works" is good enough 9 times out of 10 and if some tests fail well ... YOLO and the web page will probably render anyway.

Contrast that to using Scheme or Lisp where AI will have trouble simply keeping the parentheses balanced.

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To be fair, take away a human's paren highlighting and see how well they do.
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You adjust pretty quickly. Taking away compiler error messages would be fun though.
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Not everyone is a "coder" you know, some of us are engineers.
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