I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

It's very sad, for me.

Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.

If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games.

I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs.

It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them.

I don't see a solution here.

Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.

The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.

Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.

While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.

Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!).

Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit.

It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!

You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.

> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.

The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.

I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)

It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.

You are not the first person to say things like this.

Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?

On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.

You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.

Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”

One's ability to reverse a binary tree (which is a BS filter, but it is what it is) hasn't been an indicator of ability in some time. What _is_ though, is the wherewithall to understand _when_ that's important and tradeoffs that come with doing that versus using other data structures or systems (in the macro).

My concern is that, assuming today's trajectory of AI services and tooling, the need to understand these fundamentals will become less important over time as the value of "code" as a concept decreases. In a world where prompting is cheap because AI is writing all the code and code no longer matters, then, realistically, tech will be treated even more aggressively as a line item to optimize.

This is a sad reality for people like me whose love for computers and programming got them into this career. Tech has been a great way to make a wonderful living for a long time, and it's unfortunate that we're robbing future generations of what we took for granted.

There are millions of people that can code as well as you are I and a lot cheaper if you are in the US. Thousands of developers have been laid off over the last three years and tech companies keep going strong - what does that tell you?

I’m just as happy to get away from writing for loops in 2026 as was to be able to get away with LDA, LDX and BRA instructions once I could write performant code in C.

And how are we robbing future generations? Because some of us (not that I can take credit for any of it) move the state of technology from the 1Mhz Apple //e I had in 1986?

Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument.

I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on:

> If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.

The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.

Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.

Then what is it.

be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.

It's that the erosion and atrophying of the fundamental skill that made you (or, in this case, the GP) valuable is a matter of concern, because you (or GP, as the case may be) are willingly embracing the fact that you will be no more valuable than the average office office worker, and so can expect that compensation will drop to match.

As an example, moving to Python from C was was moving to a higher level of abstraction, but it still didn't jettison the need for actually knowing how to program!

Moving to LLMs from Python does jettison any need to know what an object is, what "parse, don't validate" actually means, etc.

If the problem you are solving with the LLM doesn't need that knowledge, then that job doesn't need all those valuable programming skills anyway, and thus you are no more valuable than the average clerk toiling away in the middle of some organisation.

> be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.

Very classy.

I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture.

Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem

What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pay someone a lot less than me (or any American - I’m in no way bragging about comp) to code.

Companies don’t pay my employer the bill rate they charge for me based on how well I code. While I’ve been expected to produce production level code as part of my job across 5 companies in the past decade not a single one asked me to write a line of code as part of the interview. They were much more concerned about ability to get things done.

Ironically, even the job at BigTech that landed in my lap was all behavioral (AWS ProServe). I damn sure didn’t get that job because of my whopping two years of AWS experience at the time. Most of my answers for “tell me about a time when…” were leading non AWS projects.

I’m not bragging - I’m old. My competitive advantage should be more than just my coding ability.

Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose).

I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me valuable (in a similar position that you have, except that I don't write a line of code) is the current ability to program.

I (and you, no doubt) would be useless in the type of position that you are in if you didn't sweat blood earlier in your career getting things right while programming.

What I am saying is that my entire value proposition is built on a high skill level in programming. Letting those skills atrophy is, in my opinion, devaluing myself.

You cdn substitute customer for “the business”.

When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the entire system - I specialize in AWS architecture + app dev - including how to deal with people.

In enterprise dev - no one cares about the code - they care about functionality. They never cared about the code. In large tech companies they have to care about the code.

For me, the coding part is not even small, it's non-existent!

I still feel that the coding skills I have make me much more valuable.

My company pays me to build software that helps make them money. They don't care how I write that software as long as I do it fast and correctly. If that's by hand, I'll do it by hand. If vibe coding can get the job done, then I'll do that.

"Vibe coding" isn't just writing specs. It's ensuring that the vibe coding process doesn't introduce regressions, new bugs, etc. My boss writes specs for me, which, if I were to naively plop them into cursor or Claude code, would generate stuff that kinda works but not in a way that could be considered production ready. I plan, adjust the plan, generate, regenerate, refine. Could it be done faster by hand? Maybe. But it's the tool I've chosen for the job and the bosses are happy with it.

Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc.

They know everything, except how to program.

In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program.

In my experience (Banking, Insurance, Fintech, etc) they were invaluable.

If, while developing, you hit some ambiguity in the spec, you could always go to the BA that wrote the spec and clarify, and I've never had the situation where they responded "Wait, let me ask the customer"; they knew what the business process should be, what the workflow should be, etc.

It worked for the customer as well - when they had trouble deciding "should or workflow do $FOO or $BAR?", a quick chat to our BA would be enough for them to make a decision.

Now, having worked in Agile shops (which I believe are the majority), there is no space for a BA - the ethos is "through something together, and if the customer doesn't want it, refine it until they do", so any BAs in this shop tend to be superfluous anyway because there is no place for them in the process anyway.

That's a failure of the process, not a failure of the role.

But soon enough, all s/ware dev jobs will be that, because LLMs can write code faster than humans can.

Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much.

I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.

LLMs are a multiplier. If this depressed you, then there is no way I can see the following happening.

> If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say!

What LLMs are going to do is multiply the amount of "none of your colleagues care" and "Management only does lip-service to ..."

It's the nature of the job. A CRUD REST server needs to be built. It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it. The interesting part of the job is over there, in whatever actually-novel part of the system is being built. But someone still has to build the CRUD REST server. There are frameworks and patterns that help, but not as much as you'd think, or they claim.

It's just part of the job. By far the largest and least interesting part of the job.

I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.

If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).

But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.

I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.

but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?

If these tools improve to the point of being able to write real code, the financial move for the agent runners is to charge far more than they are now but far less than the developers being replaced.

I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.

It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.

Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.

Then along game the flying shuttle and the weavers were even happier - producing twice as much cloth and needing half as many spinners.

The the spinning jenny came along and spinners (typically the wife of the weaver) were basically unemployed, so much so that the workers took to breaking into the factories to destroy the jennys.

But the weavers were on the same track. They no longer owned their own equipment in their own home, they were centralised in factories using equipment owned by the industrialists.

Over the entire period first spinners, then weavers, lost their jobs, even with the massive explosion in output.

Meanwhile lower skilled jobs (typically with barely paid children) abounded (with no safety requirements)

Fortunately in the 1800s English industrialists had some amount of virtue, and the workers organised into unions, so economic damage wasn't as widespread as it could have been.

This power imbalance between the owners and workers was only really arrested after the world wars - first with ww1 where many owner's sent their children to battle and lost their heirs, then later with strong government reacting to the public post ww2.

If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.

In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.

I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.

The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."

"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.

My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.

With every new frontier model released [0]:

1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or

2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.

I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.

[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.

Claude Code came out a year ago.

Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?

I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".

Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability. Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is not the process happening here, and it's not clear what direction the valuation is going.

... even if we take for granted that any of this is really happening.

Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.

Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.

Depends how you look at it.

Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.

That would be "trickle up economics", though.

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.

What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop.

It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.

I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration.

In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only now without coding sessions to clear my brain.

Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace.

LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes.

Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.

Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.

I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to codify it in the prompt.

And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-of-the-art of the industry.

I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me.

I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.

THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns.

Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.

I've been exploring some computer vision recognition stuff. Being able to reason through my ideas with an LLM, and make visualizations like t-SNE to show how far apart a coke can and a bag of cheetos are in feature-space has been mind blowing. ("How much of a difference does tint make for recognition? Implement a slider that can show that can regenerate the 512-D features array and replot the chart")

It's helping me get an intuitive understanding 10x faster than I could reading a textbook.

Everyone is hoping to be part of those 25%.

Maybe this is the reason why I don't care that much about coding agents or have a strong opinion about them, because code was only a means to an end for me. What I enjoy is to learn about and understand systems and designing those systems, whether it's computers, operating systems or software architectures. I never did enjoy just hacking away or writing CRUD stuff.

This.

On my fun side project, I don't accept pull requests because writing the code is the fun part.

Only once did someone get mad at me for not accepting their pull request.

At the very least, it feels ergonomic and saves me keystrokes in the same way as stuff like snippets & aliases

thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now am more or less continuing to work because I want to

which will end for my employer if they insist on making me output generative excrement

AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward.

You can also use AI to write unit tests, documentation, and stuff like that, while writing the code yourself.

And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code.

Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate

My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting.

Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity.

I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time.

Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional

[1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.

You are not understanding the point. AI has to be properly supervised because it makes mistakes. Now if you are making more or as many mistakes as the AI, then you should look for a new career. You should understand the code better than the AI, because the AI has a limited context window, and for a large codebase, you should know that codebase better than the AI.

Now, you can use AI to help you understand code that someone else wrote. You can use AI to check your code. You can use AI to write unit tests. You can use AI to debug. You can use AI to summarize code. There are so many uses of AI.

But you -- you as a developer -- need to understand your codebase. If you do not understand the codebase, you can't properly supervise the AI. And there is one efficient way for you to understand a big complicated codebase. The most efficient way possible for you to learn it. That is by you writing code in that codebase, and debugging that code, and learning how to code in that codebase.

If you don't do that, then you are not qualified to supervise the AI. Now you are letting the AI loose on a codebase much larger than its context window, and you will fill the codebase with bugs.

It's like a student. Sure you can use AI to help you study, to explain things to you, but the moment you let the AI do your homework, then you are no longer learning. The homework is the practice of solving problems in that area, and as a developer, you need to write code in a codebase otherwise you have no value and the AI has no value.

I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.

Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test - about what you feel defines 'making this'?

although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol

I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too.

I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have always been my output. It's just that before I had to write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the problems and the AI makes it into code.

I think that this probably the dividing line, some people enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors), some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide when looking at AI.

Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will have a very different feeling :-)

Just a curious question, not trying to be combative or anything.

I myself will go into planning mode and ask it to implement a feature, and ask it to give me tradeoffs between implementation details. Then I might chat with it a bit to further understand the implementation before it writes the plan.

I find it to be very effective and gives me a sense of agency in my features.

I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all

When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.

YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.

However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me

Like autocomplete, it's going to work best if you already know what the end state should be and are just using it as a quicker way of getting there. If you don't already know what you're trying to complete, you might get lucky by just tabbing through to see if you find the right result, or you might spend a bunch of time only to find out that what you wanted isn't coming up for what you've typed/prompted and you're back to needing to figure out how to proceed.

Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a while, but will they? And for how long?

$660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the models trained in these facilities be capable of?

We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner.

But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper.

My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.

Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved.

Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.

Sometimes I like playing chess at the park with strangers or friends. Sometimes I like playing chess online with friends in another country.

Sometimes I like to play games online with my siblings. Sometimes I like to invite people over to play video games with me on the couch.

Sometimes I wanna watch a movie in the theater. Sometimes I wanna fire up Netflix and watch that same movie, but on my couch.

Sometimes I wanna vibe code an entire app in a weekend. Sometimes I wanna play code golf to solve a puzzle, where LLM usage defeats the purpose.

None of these are being replaced in my life despite having more "advanced" options. If anything, I get to enjoy things more because I have more options and ways to enjoy them.

The chess board is still there, not sure I see how LLM tools compels one to stop writing personal projects without AI assistance.

And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.

If a company is gonna REQUIRE vibe coding as an accelerator then it is in the company's best interest to invest in education!

Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.

Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding.

If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.

I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting.

Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.