40 years of writing code. I didn't see the end coming
I started programming when 'the cloud' was about the weather and code shipped on floppy disks. For over four decades I loved writing every line of code, but now AI writes most of it. I've become a full-time reviewer, and while I can build and maintain multiple products, I miss the satisfaction of solving hard problems myself. I'm asking: has AI given you back your time, or taken away something you loved?
I think this is just a transient phase and soon enough we'll miss this too.
Professionally speaking, at least for me, it's not worth it anymore. But personally? I won't stop using technology and I do my best to avoid AI as much as possible. I like exercising my mind, to develop new ways of thinking and above all, cultivate critical thinking! If there's no critical thinking, there's no creativity, no arts, no nothing!
Look back at how interpreted languages sped the development cycle, and empowered home users to write working stuff in Basic and Hypercard. Professional work made a leap out of these, but sysadmin people relied on scripting languages to get things done, often in perl and friends. While the new tools offer a "step up" as noted, turning developers into reviewers, and possibly empowering home users, I see some problems. AI tends to reinvent the wheel at every turn, and whether I am a professional developer wanting reliable and thoroughly tested routines as building blocks, or the home user not wanting the fridge to launch a DDOS attack on government sites, this seems counter to good practice, and the verbosity makes review difficult, so you have to get your tools to review your tools. And there's no learning. Our great skill is in confronting the unknown, and ma lose this when everything is a button-push (or prompt) away. I chug away at piano, rather than letting the MIDI play stuff.
I think it has move the balance between two things that I love on top of increasing something I don't love that much. I love(d) to figure out hard code and write it, but I also loved the creative process of searching the solution space and deciding (and optimizing) what to build. I do not in general like to review code that much, which, granted, has grown. But I feel that for me, all the former (figure out hard code and write it) has mostly split into the other two (in lack of better word) "solution design" and reviewing. And also I feel that the endless supply of crappy yolo code for personal project is thrilling. Professionally I watch some code like a hawk and some is yolo, based on a concrete per "job" risk assessment. And for context, I have administered unixy systems and written software for pay since 1999.
Whether it was our career aspiration or not, we’ve turned into middle managers now