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I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code

The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering

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There is some truth to that, thus i wonder, if they will not solve that by creating architectural harnesses. Like look at repo x. Condense its coding style and architecture into a prompt. Remember that prompt everytime you create a new module.

But i get where you sre coming from

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I agree with your take if we talking about large complex industrial software

but guess what ???? most software don't

Timmy don't need to understand how landing page works in order to sell his cookie startup online

see where I am going ???? You are not get replaced

AI just replace people that work in "dirty and crude" work, think of its like wordpress plugin fixer from third world country

this is part of industry that you never touch and not want to work

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I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.

However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.

It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.

I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.

But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.

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I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.

It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.

I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

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There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.
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