I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.
But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.
I realized I most enjoy higher level problem solving but don’t really enjoy implementation. Like I enjoy algorithms, data structures, memory allocation strategies, SIMD optimization, etc. But writing the code, and debugging it is tedious and takes me out of flow.
And if I’m really interested in the project itself then the algorithms take a back seat and I enjoy the even higher level problem solving of building a cool project.
I don’t think it makes you lesser to enjoy these things more than literally banging out code, and hunting down bugs. Perhaps I’ve written enough code that I don’t find the same joy in that. Who knows.
If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.
If tech paid less, say minimum wage, they would all leave and none of them would ever tinker around anything in their free time. I’m not depressed, I’m just disappointed by how many folks are like that in this industry I loved.
You're certainly welcome to miss what coding was, but being rude to engineers who are trying to build businesses is just as ridiculous and entitled as this article is.
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 don’t need to see why you feel the desperate need to larp as a technologist when you’re happy with letting an agent solve all the technical problems.
You only think it is rude because you have tied your identity to being a technologist when you are not, I’m just saying it like it is.
This is a false comparison. Agents cannot solve all the technical problems, so the entire statement falls apart.
Out of curiosity, when you take a bite of a burger do you call it a product?
When you watch a movie do you call it content?
And given that fast food is the pinnacle of sustenance as a product and Hollywood has been content-brained since 1977, sure!
You can feel free to cope by inventing imaginary bad guys. But the reality is that there are a wide variety of reasons people coded by hand. And people that are different than you aren’t somehow inferior or bad.
I love writing code, but I don't love every single part of writing code. In particular, I really disliked getting stuck on some irrelevant detail, some mysterious error that had nothing to do with my code (dep issues, OS quirks, silent changes, auth failures, researching alternatives), and spinning my tires, unable to work on what I wanted to accomplish. Often I never made it through the far side; I've got a project directory littered with half-finished projects.
Having an AI to figure all that junk out for me so I can focus on the thing I want to build is fantastic. I worry about losing the grip I still have, but for now I've lost some things I loved (a lot of actual code-writing, solving nice straightforward problems), but gained what might as well be superpowers to help with some real shortcomings I had. It's been a net-positive trade for me so far.
And none of my personal projects have made me rich yet...
In other words, people who just wanted to become managers.
At least I’m honest, I never cared for what my company does, I only liked the interesting technical problems it let me solve, and the high salarye it gave me, now I can only thank it for its high salary.
I enjoy what I do but I confess to being “in technology” because I need to earn a living not because it’s some sort of passion project. I think it’s pretty horrible to wish us all out of job so you can feel superior again.
Regardless, I wish you all lose your jobs to AI and be forced to leave technology and earn money elsewhere. I think it’s been a disaster to the quality of the technology surrounding us and the community that creates technology to have so many opportunists just in it for the money.
Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.
Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech. We can be free[1].
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[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine
The stuff I’m building is things I could only dream of before. With LLMs, I can build things in a year that would have taken me a lifetime before.