In b4 someone mentions some famous artists had apprentices under them.

I might start watching golf, and everytime someone else get's the ball in the hole i'll take credit for it. "Did you see what did there? "

What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist?

What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Florence --- is it not architecture? Is it not art?

Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.

I like this. I'm going to see if my boss will go for me changing my title from Solutions Architect to Solutions Commissioner. I'll insist people refer to me as "Commissioner ajcp"

Indeed, of all the possible things to say!

AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast without it and enjoy the process this author callously calls "wrestling with computers."

Of course this isn't going to help with the whole "making me fast at things I don't know" but that's another can of worms.

I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

I am happy to accept that some people still prefer to write out their code by hand… that’s ok? Keep doing it if you want! But I would gently suggest you ask yourself why you are so offended by people that would prefer to automate much of that, because you seem to be offended. Or am I misreading?

And hey, I still enjoy solving interesting problems with code. I did advent of code this year with no LLM assistance and it was great fun. But most professional software development doesn’t have that novelty value where you get to think about algorithms and combinatorical puzzles and graphs and so on.

Before anyone says it, sure, there is a discussion to be had about AI code quality and the negative effects of all this. A bad engineer can use it to ship slop to production. Nobody is denying that. But I think that’s a separate set of questions.

Finally, I’m not sure painting is the best analogy. Most of us are not creating works of high art here. It’s a job, to make things for people to use, more akin to building houses than painting the Sistine Chapel. Please don’t sneer at use if we enjoy finding ways to put up our drywall quicker.

It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful.

Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!

I have found in my software writing experience that the majority of what I want to write is boiler plate with small modifications but most of the problems are insanely hard to diagnose edge cases and I have absolutely no desire nor is it a good use of time in my opinion to deal with structural issues in things that I do not control.

The vast majority of code you do not control because you aren’t the owner of the framework or library your language or whatever and so the Bass majority of software engineering is coming up with solutions to foundational problems of the tools you’re using

The idea that this is the only true type of software engineering is absurd

True software engineering is systems, control and integration engineering.

What I find absolutely annoying is that there’s this rejection of the highest level Hofstetter level of software architecture and engineering

This is basically sneered at over the idea of “I’m gonna go and try to figure out some memory management module because AMD didn’t invest in additional SOC for the problems that I have because they’re optimized for some Business goals.”

It’s frankly junior level thinking

You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart.

Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation?

Most of the time it's wasting time learning some bs framework or implementing some other poorly designed system that some engineer that no longer works at the company created. In fact the entire industry is basically just one poorly designed system with technological debt that grows increasingly burdensome year by year.

It's very rarely about actual programming or actual computation or even "engineering". But usually just one giant kludge pile.

Development is solely to exchange labor for money.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since 1992. I did it for my degree between 1992-1996 while having fun in college and after that depending on my stage in life, dating, hanging out with friends, teaching fitness classes and doing monthly charity races with friends, spending time with my wife and (step)kids, and now enjoying traveling with my wife and friends, and still exercising

Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.

I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.

At home, I never had the time/will to be as thorough. Too many other things to do in life. Pre-LLMs, most of my personal scripts are just - messy.

One of the nice things with LLM assisted coding is that it almost always:

1. Gives my program a nice interface/UI

2. Puts good print/log statements

3. Writes tests (although this is a hit or miss).

Most of the time it does it without being asked.

And it turns out, these are motivation multipliers. When developing something, if it gives me good logs, and has a good UI, I'm more likely to spend time developing it further. Hence, coding is now more joyful.

And it turns out, these tend to

You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name.

I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference in our present moment, of course, is that the "assistants" are mechanical ones.

(as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then also, I don't enjoy writing grunt code / boilerplate etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, - and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)

The “lone genius” image is largely a modern romantic invention.

Programming a system at a low-level from scratch is fun. Getting CSS to look right under a bunch of edge cases - I won't judge that programmer too harshly for consulting the text machine.

This is especially true considering it's these shallow but trivia-dominated tasks which are the least fun and also which LLMs are the most effective at accomplishing.

But we are, even as of Opus 4.5, so wildly far away from what the author is suggesting. FWIW my experience is working in the AI/ML space at a major tech company and as a maintainer + contributor of several OSS projects.

People are blindly trusting LLMs and generating mountains of slop. And the slop compounds.

Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal?

If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction.

Which means its incapabilities in C and ASM don't disappear when using it for higher-level languages. They're still there, just temporarily smoothed over due to larger datasets.

And I asked codex to fix them for me, first attempt was to add comments to disable the rules for the whole file and just mark everything as any.

Second attempt was to disable the rules in the eslint config.

It does the same with tests it will happily create a work around to avoid the issue rather than fix the issue.

> If you can't see this, I have to seriously question your competence as an engineer in the first place tbh.

I can't agree more strongly. I work with a number of folks who say concerning things along the lines of what you describe above (or just slightly less strong). The trust in a system that is not fully trustworthy is really shocking, but it only seems to come from a particular kind of person. It's hard to describe, but I'd describe it as: people that are less concerned with the contents of the code versus the behaviour of the program. It's a strange dichotomy, and surprising every time.

I mean, if you don't get the economics of a reasonably factored codebase vs one that's full of hacks and architecturally terrible compromises - you're in for a VERY bad time. Perhaps even a company-ending bad time. I've seen that happen in the old days, and I expect we're in the midst of seeing a giant wave of failures due to unsustainably maintained codebases. But we probably won't be able to tell, startups have been mostly failing the entire time.

This simply is a mediocre take, sometimes I feel like people never actually coded at all to have such opinions

You're what, 250 years behind at this point?

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution there is a general trend that fewer can make more with less. And really even bigger than AI were fast fuel based transportation and then global networks. Long before we started worrying about genAI, businesses have been consolidating down to a few corporations that make enough to supply the world from a singular large factories.

We fought the war against companies. Companies won.

Now you're just at the point where the fabric makers were, where the man with the pick axe was, where the telephone switch operator was, where the punch card operator was.

With AI you have to be careful to know what is important, you dont want to waste your time doing random stuff that may not even get a single user. If its for fun, thats fine but if you want to build a business or improve your output, I would advise people to choose well.

To use LLMs effectively, you have to be an excellent problem-solver with complex technical problems. And developing those skills has always been the goal of CS education.

Or, more bluntly, are you going to hire the junior with excellent LLM skills, or are you going to hire the junior with excellent LLM skills and excellent technical problem-solving skills?

But they do have to be able to use these tools in the modern workplace so we do cover some of that kind of usage. Believe me, though, they are pretty damned good at it without our help. The catch is when students use it in a cheating way and don't develop those problem-solving skills and then are screwed when it comes time to get hired.

So our current thinking is there's no real shortcut other than busting your ass like always. The best thing LLMs offer here is the ability to act as a tutor, which does really increase the speed of learning.

You spent the proverbial 10k hours like before. I don't know by AI has to lead to the lack of learning. I don't find people stop learning digital painting so far, even digital painting, from my perspective, is even more "solved" than programming by machines.

I heard that Pixar had a very advanced facial expression simulation system a decade ago. But I am very willing to bet that when Pixar hires animators they still prefer someone who can animate by hand (either in Maya or frame-by-frame on paper).

https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/a-guide-to-gen-ai-llm-vi...