Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.
There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.
I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.
For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.
There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.
Right now, that's the case, but I wouldn't put a Kalshi bet on it remaining that way.
I "grew up," from the days of pure Machine Code.
In Ye Days of Yore, all programmers were expected to understand a core dump, which is a printout (yes, a printout) of thousands of hex numbers, representing the memory of the server, when it crashed.
It's tempting to use this as some kind of bar of competence, but I am constantly astounded at the things that are produced by people that would absolutely freak out at a core dump.
In the early days of compiled/interpreted languages, even top-level programmers wrote in FORTRAN or BASIC. ASM was just getting its feet under it.
I think that we'll be seeing some marvelous stuff.
...as long as Skynet doesn't consider us a threat...
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community.
Pedro_Ribeiro•12m ago
This on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).
The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.