I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code then you're not a programmer, you're a middle manager. So maybe you never actually wanted to be a programmer but instead you liked having things built?
You are delegating work and reviewing delegated work, but not managing. No performance coaching, no career development, no mentoring, no conflict resolution, no influencing opinions, and on and on.
So it looks like you're doing all the management work required by your reports, and if your reports were more capable you'd need to do more of the other things mentioned as well.
My original comment was to signal that if all you do now is write descriptions to feed to agents then you're not a programmer any more but you've become a manager as what you're doing is a management role and not an artistic or engineering one. You've changed jobs and you should be fine with that, just acknowledge it and move on, but stop fooling yourself that you're still a programmer or engineer. You're not, you're a manager now, even if you're not doing most of the things required of a people manager, as in your comment.
That's silly. You may as well say Santiago Calatrava isn't an architect any more because he's delegating the vast majority of the architecture work for his projects.
poisonborz · · focus · HN ↗
Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).
daemin · · focus · HN ↗
empthought · · focus · HN ↗
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code, then you’re not a programmer, you’re a software architect.
Middle managers have to supervise people, otherwise they are not managers.
daemin · · focus · HN ↗
empthought · · focus · HN ↗
daemin · · focus · HN ↗
My original comment was to signal that if all you do now is write descriptions to feed to agents then you're not a programmer any more but you've become a manager as what you're doing is a management role and not an artistic or engineering one. You've changed jobs and you should be fine with that, just acknowledge it and move on, but stop fooling yourself that you're still a programmer or engineer. You're not, you're a manager now, even if you're not doing most of the things required of a people manager, as in your comment.
empthought · · focus · HN ↗