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For me it has the opposite effect. Now I can finally use whatever programming language I want! Is my language missing a library? No worries Opus will write one!
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I've ended up alternating between "the LLM can write the awful glue code I'm too lazy to hand wring for my proof of concept" and "ooh, what if this was in Fortran _and_ JavaScript?"

Dark times.

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AI workflows don't seem to be suited to image-based environments like Smalltalk's, though.
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Unless you give them a tool which lets them execute arbitrary code in the running image.

Or at least this works wonderfully in Clojure via the nREPL.

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On the other hand, ai agent harnesses work a bit like image based system - think: claude --resume
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I am sorry to hear that, I hope you will rediscover the joys of programming one day again!

Humans haven't given up playing chess just because computers are able to do it better, there is still a point in recreational programming.

I am fondly remembering actually using Smalltalk in production for a small web project. I think I used Squeak with the Seaside framework. The image based workflow made deploying it surprisingly easy.

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What I was trying to focus on was "getting the job done". If I want to program for pure enjoyment, I can certainly still do that. Although some people may play chess for a living, most that play chess don't.
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For me it's been liberating because I no longer have to worry about what languages I choose to spend my free time on at the risk of missing out on something more practical. For example, I love Common Lisp, but taking time relearn it always felt to come at the expense of something else that might also confer practical benefit. Now, in a sense, all programming languages are equally useless.

I recently did a major move and had to restructure my bookshelf pretty dramatically. The only programming books I kept out of storage where the Common Lisp and Prolog ones. Spending time learning a language that doesn't directly impact how you think about computation itself seems to be more of misuse of time (of course really, when programming truly for fun it shouldn't matter one way or the other).

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>One thing that AI programming has done is made me care much less what programming language is being used

I'm right there with you. I really like programming in Python, the language. Now that I'm not writing much if any code, the rough edges in building and deployment have come to the forefront. Even "uvx run" has become a sticky wicket (I have some machines that don't have Internet access).

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