It feels infinitely worse than mentoring an inexperienced engineer, because Claude is inhuman. There's no personal relationship, it doesn't make human mistakes or achieve human successes, and if Claude happens to get better in the future, that's not because you personally taught it anything. And you certainly can't become friends.
They want to turn artists and craftsmen into assembly line supervisors.
the same was uttered by blacksmiths and other craftsman who has been displaced by technology. Yet they are mercilessly crushed.
Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it; and if there's a more efficient way, it will be adopted. The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here - and when someone's identity is being threatened (as it very much is right now with these new AI tools), they respond very negatively.
This is misleading. The job of blacksmith wasn't automated away. There's just no demand for their services anymore, because we no longer have knights wearing armor, brandishing swords, and riding horses. In contrast, computer software is not disappearing; if anything, it's becoming ubiquitous.
> Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it
But it is a consideration to me in offering my services. And everyone admits that even with LLMs and agents, experienced senior developers are crucial to keep the whole process from falling into utter crap and failure. Claude can't supervise itself.
> The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here
No, it's just about not wanting to spend a large portion of my waking hours doing something I hate.
However, at no point was the exact technical approach prescribed to me. It'd be asinine if someone came to me and said, "you need to be using VSCode, not vim." It's irrelevant to execution. Yet, that's exactly what's happening with LLMs.
The denial of agency to devs via prescriptive LLM edicts will only end badly.
Why didn't blacksmiths produce rail tracks, if not because they were replaced by more efficient processes? One could say iron and steel became as ubiquitous during the Industrial Revolution as computer software is becoming today...
This is not how it works. The technology will prevail or not based on whether people using it are noticeably more efficient using it, not the whims of your CEO - nor yours!
You then make an argument as to why you think the net gain will not be positive, which is fine, but that crucial question is what everything hinges on.
This is really a silly and pointless discussion, as well as totally irrelevant.
The linked article made very clear that Claude had to be closely, strictly guided and supervised by expert software developers. Claude is not threatening them with extinction.