#core

I'm bored and sad about my profession

This is kind of a stream of consciousness so bear with me, I'm not really going anywhere with this, I just figured I'd put thoughts into text.

I've been programming for more than half of my life, first self taught then in uni then as a professional. I've always been passionate about it. I groking problems, implementing new things, tweaking, figuring out problems, solving the "puzzle". I love discovering new techs and using them. I've gone through so many different languages, platforms and it's always been mostly very fun, there's obviously always some things that suck like that one bug that you spend two weeks solving (I remember when I was implementing RC delegations it was making me go crazy at times).

But it was very rewarding, and ever since I started agentic coding about 8 months ago, I realized that I don't code anymore, I'm a reviewer or sometimes just a QA. I find a bug, I send claude to it, I submit a PR I get an AI generated response, I look at it, then feed it to another AI and wait for it to do the work. I'm much closer to a tech manager than a programmer anymore.

The fun part is now automated and only the boring part is left to us

That's truly how I feel. I sit all day watching claude do stuff, steering it and not coding myself, because it's kind of pointless, agentic coding is so incredibly faster, if you don't like the way it's doing something, it's going to be faster to explain rather than refactor it yourself. The value add is no longer in programming, it's in architecture (which to be fair is still fun) reviewing / testing. Even learning new languages is now kind of pointless when every LLM is now fluent in all of them.

And that sucks.

Recently I picked up a programming game out of curiosity https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060160/The_Farmer_Was_Replaced/ (your task is to basically program a robot to farm) which got me to code meaningfully again (I mean programming for 4+ hours without the use of AI) and it made me realize how much I missed it. I missed the tinkering, I missed the "aha !" moment when you figure something out, I missed optimizing things, I missed building.

I'm not anti AI per se, you'd need to be blind to not see the massive productivity gains. And I'm glad we are able to accomplish so much more with so much less effort. But I'm sad that this is what it's become. There used to be real software craftsmanship. Big discussions in MRs with peers discussing solutions and other things, nowadays I feel like most of the time I'm interacting with an AI or talking to someone who's just a proxy for an LLM (regurgitating what it's telling him). I

And it makes me sad, because my job was my hobby and passion now it's just a job. It's like if I was a professional carpenter making chairs and suddenly the wooden 3d printer gets invented (eh not sure about the analogy but you get the idea). I wonder if this is how the early programmers felt when the compilers became mainstream.

Anyways I'm just rambling so I'll cut this short. You get the point. The times are evolving and I don't like it. I'm painting an extra gloom picture where a lot of it kind of isn't true, there's still value to programming yourself, domain knowledge is more important than ever because you need to fact check the bullshit, same thing for learning the language your LLM is writing in, don't nitpick on the details, it's more of a global sentiment.

@howo

edit: Lol I tagged this "core" I am so used to posting exclusively about core dev that I forgot that I wrote something completely irrelevant

Comments · 8

@rishi556(72)· 4d
You are still better than most "devs" who just got got started with AI. I've got a lot of friends who've made stuff, deployed on AWS and their costs is multiple $100s/mo for something that can be better designed to run for $5.
@azircon(79)· 4d
Plumbing

Farming

Electrical work

Car Mechanic

Nurse

These are all reasonable professions........

That is what my kids will do. There is still time to pick up on these professions.
@moon32walker(72)· 4d
There are pros and cons. Its just many leagues faster than human coding, coding evolved. But it is also completely dependent on capable human input to guide it. My example is I made a full stack crypto card game on Immutable zkEVM in 4 months. Without Claude that would be impossible to do. It will only get crazier from here.
@themarkymark(81)· 5d
You don't have to use AI, just will be left behind. Everyone is a developer now, but non-developers suck so bad with AI it isn't even remotely close. Understanding development and technology will go a long way even with AI coding. Dunning-Kruger is going to prove to be a big issue for many of these "new developers".

This isn't new, technology has sherlocked a lot of jobs. Wait till you see the damage AI does to the trucking industry. One of the largest industries that will be quickly replaced once auto driving is normalized.
@erikah(83)· 5d
This is sad, can understand the feeling and I suppose in time it's going to get worse. How do you think things are going to evolve in 5 - 10 years in this regard? As there's no turning back now.
@tarazkp(86)· 5d

nowadays I feel like most of the time I'm interacting with an AI or talking to someone who's just a proxy for an LLM (regurgitating what it's telling him).

It isn't just the coders- all people are turning into regurgitators.
@steevc(80)· 5d
I've been a developer for a long time and I do enjoy creating code. I've not got into the AI stuff and I'm sure I am missing out, so I may have to take a look. I'm not that far off retiring, so maybe I can leave it to the next generation. I just never wanted to be a manager.
@emrebeyler(76)· 5d
love-hate relationship