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.
Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think that's the case.
If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought. You can just judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of abstraction has been added.
Just like people more, and have better meetings.
Life is what you make it.
Enjoy yourself while you can.
You get paid in the top 1% globally
You have benefits
Some hope or dreams for what to do with your future, life after work, retirement.
You get to work with other people, overseas.
Talk to those contractors sometimes. They are under tremendous pressure. They are mistreated. One wrong move, they're gone. They undergo tremendous prejudices, and soft racism everyday especially by us FTEs.
You find out that they struggle with the drudgery as well, looking for solutions, better understanding, etc.
We all feel disposable by our corporate masters, but they feel it even more so.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Gladly! I think what I would choose is building on-shore teams exclusively. That's the change I'd like to see more of, while overseas teams build their own economies instead of ripping away jobs from domestic citizens in an already difficult job market.