@manton i see myself falling somewhere between buckets, i suppose.
but it’s not my “purpose” i’m worried about. my purpose is now to manage my agents.
i’m worried about joy.
because if you feed this AI machine an obscene amount of money, it will happily do the all the fun parts of programming.
@isaiah @manton The joy argument comes up constantly. With corresponding delay, the situation in the artisan coders bucket is getting into similar shape as with illustrators taking hit from the image-gen.
https://mastodon.social/@mrudokas/116218656952541716
But really, nothing can take away the drawing or solving programming puzzles from you. It’s only that you may not afford anymore to have that fun 8 hours per day, every day.
@isaiah @manton And then, if starving artist’s position does not suit you, you go into managing AI zombies or being a garbage men. And on weekends you play Zachtronics games, or sink hands into your inks and paints. And hope that is enough to not get depressed. Can be hard if for decades you were paid for having fun.
@mrudokas @manton for 30 years i’ve been lucky that this creative thing i enjoy would also pay the bills. but i think that situation was always an anomaly. AI is inevitable correction.
like musicians and artists, i now have to separate my hobbies from my career.
it’s an uncomfortable adjustment, but i’m trying to be grateful for the 30 years i enjoyed that anomaly, rather than bitter that i’ve reached the end.
@isaiah Don’t you have the choice to still write code yourself rather than using AI? As in, you don’t have a manager or new company policy forcing you to adopt it.
I’m interested because in my company I’m working with a development team who are very much hands-off in terms of AI and until something really shifts to force a change, and I don’t currently know what that would be, I don’t see us changing course.
@simon most places I know are taking away that choice. And I understand why— most programmers in most programming jobs have the potential to see astronomical productivity gains. You simply can’t opt out if you’re in a competitive space and all of your competitors are opting in
@jsonbecker I’m not totally convinced by that argument. Software development is about a lot more than generating lines of code. Just as lines of code has never been a good measure of programmer productivity, the ability to generate massive amounts may not result in more productive teams.
@devilgate I can understand your skepticism. As a manager who still ships code every week, there are many things to be concerned about. The productivity gains are real. It generates new and different challenges as well, but there are entire things that have shifted from “possible but not feasible” to “done before we even have that conversation”. The results are real, and very few people who have steadfastly refused can still say that it’s not a huge boost if they’ve tried things in the last 6 months. You can maintain a moral/ethical stance against it, but if you’re building nuts and bolts stuff, be prepared to lose your business on that stance.