I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.
[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
supaflybanzai · · focus · HN ↗
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.
supaflybanzai · · focus · HN ↗
And I still very much like using LLMs for certain things. I do not miss Googling for hours to compile the right information.