Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate.
Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful.
↫ Orta Therox
Oh sweet Summer child.
As a former translator, I can tell you that’s how it starts. As time goes on, your clients or your manager will demand more and more code from you. You will stop checking every line to meet the deadlines. Maybe you just stop checking the boilerplate at first, but it won’t stay that way. As pressure to be more “productive” mounts, you’ll start checking fewer and fewer lines. Before you know it, your client or manager will just give you entire autogenerated swaths of code, and your job will be to just go over it, making sure it kind of works. Before long, you realise there are fewer and fewer of you. Younger and less-skilled “developers” can quickly go over autogenerated code just as well as you do – but they’re way cheaper. You see the quality of the code you sign off on deteriorate rapidly, but you have no time, and not enough pay, to rewrite the autogenerated code. It works, kind of, and that will have to be enough. The autogenerated codebases you’re supposed to be checking and fixing are so large now, you’re no longer even really checking anything anymore. Quick, cursory glances, that’s all you have time for and can afford. Documentation and commenting code went out the window a long time ago, and every line of code scrolling across your screen is more tech debt you don’t care about, because it’s not your code anyway.
And then it hits you.
There’s no skill here. There’s no art here. You’re no longer a programmer. There’s no career prospects. Scrolling past shitty autogenerated code day in, day out, without the time or pay to wrangle it into something to be proud of, is the end of the line for you. Speak up about it, and you’ll be replaced by someone cheaper.
The first time I was given a massive pile of autotranslated text to revise, without enough time and pay to ensure I was delivering a quality product, I quit and left the translation industry instantly. Like programming, translating is part skill, part art, and I didn’t get two university degrees in language and translation just to deliver barely passable trash. I took pride in my work, and I wasn’t going to let anyone put my name under a garbage product.
Programmers, you’re next. Will you have the stones to stand by your art?
Very well put, thank you Thom… Amen!
Big tech spent over $150 billion on “ai” this year, with hundreds more to come.
Anyone who is considering whether they should sloppify their brains and/or output better take into account that the monetisation hammer *will* be smashed into the industry. And it will hit Hard with a capital “h”.
We have no choice Thom. A director at my company speaks of “infinite resources” now that we have AI “coworkers.”
The thing is, this is not about the quality of the work. I am sure that AI cannot translate as well as you, nor can it write code as I do. Today. I share your existential and societal dread, but not you cynicism towards technology itself.
These are not “word calculators” or “spiced-up auto-completes.” No amount of quotes around the term “artificial intelligence” will change the true nature of it. These are digital brains and there is no fundamental reason why they can’t do everything we do, and better.
The copyright thing is a red herring, too. These things are coming, and they will take all our jobs, and the laws will not stop it.
If I try to be an optimist, I can imagine humanity being very comfortable or taking on larger challenges like colonizing space, where we could use all the help we can get. But before we get there, we’ll need to survive the death of capitalism and avoid another world war. These are undeniably tough times.
drstorm,
I share Thom and other’s concerns about the social implications of AI. I also share your opinion that too many people are not taking the threats seriously enough, as though it’s all going to go away….it’s not. It’s going to keep growing into more sectors and while the AI isn’t going to do the jobs perfectly or take them over overnight. It’s more about the long term trends.
So many people are critical of AI’s output quality which is fair enough but I think many have been ignoring the employer’s calculus. Suppose AI can do 15 people’s jobs imperfectly and it takes 8 people to correct the AI’s work (completely fictitious numbers used as an example)….the AI doesn’t need to be perfect and it can still be a net win for employers.. These financial incentives are not going away! Moreover I believe AI deficiencies today will keep improving every generation to the point where the AI is not only cheaper, but to the point where we will no longer have the benefit of calling AI results worse. IMHO this is only a matter of time.
It’s a scary world. What I fear most is the rise of literal fascism in my own figurative backyard.
It’s not that scary. We are closer to the world described by Iain M. Banks in his Culture series, and it is a better world than the nineteenth century world that some people expect us to praise.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
I am a layman on nineteenth century history, so I can’t speak much to that. However for many of us alive I think the rise in authoritarianism is new to us. I would not have wanted to learn about it this way, but modern events might be a good way to understand how it was that the Nazis could rise to power.
> the rise in authoritarianism is new to us
Not for everybody here. I was born in the USSR and there is nothing new about it, believe me.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Ok, I hear that, but let me ask you do you perceive the rise of authoritarianism in other parts of the world? I am curious if you are ok with this or not and why.
> I am curious if you are ok with this or not and why.
Of course, I’m not ok with that. I just believe that AI has nothing to do with our perception of history. History didn’t “stop”. There is always somebody who wants to cease the power with whatever means necessary, AI or not.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Hmm, I’m rather confused how this relates to the rise in authoritarianism. I wasn’t really suggesting authoritarianism is a byproduct of AI. Although it seems very plausible that AI will be used for misinformation campaigns in the future as it becomes harder and harder to detect.
AI isn’t anywhere close to replacing programmers. By the time programmers get replaced we’ll probably have robots demanding equal rights and we find out why AGI is a terrible idea.
Certain careers are always superceeded by technology. This has always been the case.
Personal Computers basically replaced the secretarial typing pool.
Linotype was replaced by digital systems.
Translators replaced by AI/Google.
AI is here to stay. The question is if we adapt our skills and roles to take advantage of the benefits it brings, or cling to the past despite all evidence.
AI can already code better than me (and many in my team) so where can we add value in that chain?
Some new roles are obvious already, others will grow over time. Remember a lot of jobs we now do are new constructs anyway (looking at you scrum masters )
Adurbe,
I agree with many of your points, but I’d like to focus on this specific point because it seems like an assumption that any jobs displaced by AI can be replaced by something else. I accept that historically millions of jobs have become defunct only to be replaced with newer more intellectual jobs. However what does it mean when intellectual jobs themselves start being feasibly automated by technology?
AI isn’t in full swing yet, but once it’s working like a well oiled machine I don’t see there being enough new openings to replace the tsunami of jobs being displaced. Naturally the increase in AI should drive employment in AI programming, but this is very unlikely to match the number of jobs displaced by AI: drivers/cooks/farmers/VFX artists/composers/etc. These days the majority of job growth is in eldercare thanks to the never-ending demand compounded by a multi generational fertility gap.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fertility
Those are likely going to be the human jobs with the most demand even though traditionally they’re not well paid. Those jobs seem like they should be safe for as long as it’s taboo to replace eldercare employees with robots. It’s not like anybody cares about replacing a faceless truck driver or chef at a restaurant with a robot, but I would think people care more about their parents and grantparents being placed under human care. Then again, some “innovative corporation” might be able to break the taboo barrier proving eldercare can be done on the cheap with robots too.
Some people are better replaced by robots, especially in eldercare and healthcare, where they are subject to heavy regulation and strict algorithms anyway, and usually just do what they are told by the rules.
(Sorry for the small number of people who do not)
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Taking out human contact seems like a lonely and dystopian way to end life. Just me? If you genuinely think human contact & interaction is overvalued in old age, then was it ever really valuable? We can mechanize away human interactions in every part of life.
Not every human contact is a good one. We need to integrate elderly people better into society. If we can replace waiters with robots, why can’t we replace nurses with them and let elderly people interact with whatever they like?
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Obviously, but I wasn’t suggesting it was. You seem to be indifferent to cutting human contact to save on costs. The future you seem to be advocating for with robots instead of people seems like a very sad one.
Hold on a second, I didn’t say waiters should be replaced by robots even if they could be. I think humans are still preferred for many customer facing & interactive service jobs and it’s only for economic business reasons that we’d consider replacing them.
The truck drivers who drive packages across the country are impersonal faces who, for better or worse, will probably get replaced without much fanfare because interaction is not part of the service. In the same vein, a radiographer who analyzes xrays consulting with doctor but rarely have direct contact with patients will be replaced by AI without much patient backlash. However when it comes to more interactive jobs, there may be a lingering preference for interacting with human staff (when they have the choice).
I have been a professional software developer for over ten years. Ignoring AI, there are two ways to look at software development: either you are engineers who make scientific decisions, or you are artisans who know your entire craft and put your mastery into all aspects.
The engineering aspect is not something we really do, but it is something we like to imagine we would.
But the really great programmers are the artisans. This isn’t a measure of your skill level, but what you do. You are responsible for the entirety of the software you construct, or at least the aspect you are tasked with (which rarely corresponds nicely to a single component at the technical level, but it feels nice when it actually does).
I get why people might like vibe coding tho. Computers are kind of terrible now. We’ve lost the charm of them being a tool to amplify your skills and abilities. Windows is filled with ads. OS X is becoming super locked down. Linux just gets more and more complicated as time goes on. Programming a computer is more of a chore now than ever before. We lost the ease of `glBegin` and now you need thousands of lines to make a single triangle appear with Vulkan. We’re told not to use printf, now you need to learn an entirely new syntax to interact with `lldb`. I hope you have kept up with the radical changes in C++ in the last ten years. Your python script from 2009? Yeah that won’t work anymore, Python 3 is incompatible in subtle and annoying ways.
I get wanting it all to just work. Even if you like the act of programming, it’s terrible sometimes. But vibe coding is not a real solution. It’s the AI mindset, now in programming. It’s not making things better, it’s pretending there is no solution, there doesn’t need to be a solution, accept the current state of things and do not argue we should reverse certain things (which is a very flawed stance, “AI is here to stay” is not a truism, not all changes are good, and not all change is permanent, much less the astro-turf AI hype. Arguably, AI is barely even “here”, and a few loud people shouted that cryptocurrency and NFTs were here to stay not that long ago, and look how that turned out).
Uh… no. Lol. “Programmers” (which is what they incorrectly call these people) deserve the fate that’s coming. In the last 18 years the quality of software has severely deteriorated. I would hardly call the people today who ‘write software’ programmers, let alone developers or software engineers. Everything is broken. GUI’s are all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and new versions of the same software with minor incremental unnoticeable changes are constantly released way too often. Almost always without any regard for backwards compatibility. Something that worked 1 year ago won’t have any guarantee of working unmodified a year later (this is an area Microsoft really did well in).
On top of that, you need a 32 core CPU machine with gigabytes of RAM to run a program that does the same thing one did 30 years ago, that ran more than fine on the limited hardware.
These so called “developers” are highly over opinionated, narrow minded, and short sighted thinkers. The only people that will be able to keep their jobs are the true software engineers that develop core low-level systems who also consider end user experience and practicality. That and and the AI researchers building the systems that help create newer better AI models.
I look forward to this future.
tuaris,
As one of them myself, I feel you are blaming the wrong group! I used to take a lot more pride in code quality/efficiency/robustness/etc. But all too often this is deemed a waste of time by the project managers who’s main concern above everything else is managing costs to increase profits. While it’s easy to blame developers who’ve worked on the software for it’s shortcomings, more likely than not if you find the qualify lacking, we already know the quality is lacking as well! But it was somebody else’s call to release it that way.
30 years ago, only some people were able to interact with computers, and now everyone is able to get an iPad and experience some of that magic. That’s what we use that CPU power for.
I agree about the wrong group, though.
Thom, what you don’t understand is that auto translated text has no consequences for the person submitting it (save for specialized cases such as legal documents and EU patents), in most cases, people reading the auto-translated mess are expected to put up and shut up.
My native language (Greek) is often on the receiving end of auto translation, and you quickly learn to deduce the original English text (that the incomprehensible Greek text came from) than trying to decipher the actual text. For example, when Uber shows “concentration options….”, I deduce it was probably mistranslated from “concentrating options…” (upd: I switched my phone’s language to English to see if I am correct, close enough, the original is “gathering options…”).
Computer programming is different: you either tell the computer exactly what to do or the computer doesn’t do what you want it to do, “vibe coding” will not completely replace programmers because any company that tries to get cheap and drastically reduce human involvement will see more bug reports coming in that what their “AI” can fix.