https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080
"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.
When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."
There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though. You actually need to make it crystal clear what your idea is and what it is not, because of the continuous pushback from the agentic programming tool. The moment you stop pushing back, is the moment the LLM rolls over your project and more than likely destroys what was unique about your thing in the first place.
Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I graduated from college was to support my insatiable addictions to food and shelter.
While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could reasonably do over 40 hours without having other people working on projects I lead. Until the last year and a half where I could do it myself using LLMs.
Seeing my carefully designed spec that includes all of the cloud architecture get done in a couple of days - with my hands on the wheel - that would have taken at least a week with me doing some work while juggling dealing with a couple of other people - is life changing
Granted, you would learn a lot more if you had pieced your ideas together manually, but it all depends on your own priorities. The difference is, you're not stuck cleaning up after someone else's bad AI code. That's the side to the AI coin that I think a lot of tech workers are struggling with, eventually leading to rampant burnout.
Will a company pay me more for knowing those details? Will I be more affectively able to architect and design solutions that a company will pay my employer to contract me to do and my company pays me? They pay me decently not because I “codez real gud”. They pay me because I can go from empty AWS account, empty repo and ambiguous customer requirements to a working solution (after spending time talking to a customer) to a full well thought out architecture + code on time on budget and that meets requirements.
I am not bragging, I’m old those are table stakes to being able to stay in this game for 3 decades