Off topic, but I remember fondly the pre-LLM days when I used to love reading about programming languages. I never got a chance to professionally work with Rust, but made some cool hobby projects with it. Would have eventually tried out zig too.
Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.
For years I used Rust as my hobby-programming language and loved it greatly. I never managed to land a job working with it full-time, because either the work was too niche or it didn't pay enough, or I was simply too comfortable where I was to change. And now that I finally have enough discretion over my technology choices to run a "proper" project using whatever tools and languages I want, it is not me but the AI that writes all of the code.
There's a part of me that feels a quite sad about all this. It's almost as if there actually all along existed a real final deadline on finding that "dream job". And I missed it. And while I expect this one miss to be just a small piece in the grand picture of things that we're going to lose or have already lost to the zeitgeist of agentic SWE, it feels big to me. It was my professional dream, while I still had professional dreams.
I seemed to have been through this pattern in my interests multiple times and just wait in the between times for something of interest. For hobby/interests I started with programming languages and then moved into understanding hardware and then mobile devices. I wrote HP 41 s/w, HP 48 s/w, the first public dethreader for HP 48 ROMs, Newton s/w, Windows CE s/w, jailbreak s/w and on device iPhone 1.0 s/w (pre App Store), but have been waiting for the next thing since iPhone 5 or so. In languages I went through a lot as well and now am waiting on C# to be improved.
I relate to this comment so much. Like you said, just the first in many things we will lose. Gratitude I can still support my family and build cool stuff at all now.
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.
alembic_fumes · · focus · HN ↗
For years I used Rust as my hobby-programming language and loved it greatly. I never managed to land a job working with it full-time, because either the work was too niche or it didn't pay enough, or I was simply too comfortable where I was to change. And now that I finally have enough discretion over my technology choices to run a "proper" project using whatever tools and languages I want, it is not me but the AI that writes all of the code.
There's a part of me that feels a quite sad about all this. It's almost as if there actually all along existed a real final deadline on finding that "dream job". And I missed it. And while I expect this one miss to be just a small piece in the grand picture of things that we're going to lose or have already lost to the zeitgeist of agentic SWE, it feels big to me. It was my professional dream, while I still had professional dreams.
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
NetMageSCW · · focus · HN ↗
asp_hornet · · focus · HN ↗