So instead you patch it on your end and call it a day.

Yep!

I’m looking forward to the horror stories that emerge once some percentage of those changes are made solely by unmanaged hallucination-prone AI.

I would feel bad for the developera who have to clean up the mess, but honestly, it’s their chance to make $$$$$$ off of that cleanup. If they manage not to, their union is completely incompetent.

Yep! And we’re in the big tech era, so it can also be:

Business fails to produce any value and uses it’s influence to prevent the next business from popping up.

If you had to hire 100 professional programmers in the past, but then AI makes programmers 10% more efficient than previously, then you can do the same work with 91 programmers.

You’ve nailed to root of the misunderstanding by non-programmers. We’re already optimized past that target.

Some people think we type all day. We don’t. We stare at our screen saying “what the fuck?!” for most of the day. Those is especially true for the best programmers doing really interesting work.

There’s maybe three living humans who actually know how to correctly build a Windows installer. One of those three is paid to sell software to automate the task for everyone else. The other two retired already. (One is hiding out as a bar tender and claims to not speak any English if recognized from their MSI days.)

Pick an interesting topic in programming, and you’ll find similarly ludicrous optimization.

There’s a few hundred programmers building all banking automation, selling it to millions of bank employees.

It’s possible that AI will force a dozen people to stop doing banking automation. It’s a lot more likely that the backlog of unmet banking automation need will instead just get very slightly smaller.

Now, the reality of the economics won’t stop CIOs from laying off staff and betting that AI will magically expand to fill the gap. We’re seeing that now. That’s called the “fuck around” phase.

But we’ve seen “this revolutionary technology will make us not need more programmers” before (several times). The outcomes, when the dust settles are:

1. The job is now genuinely easier to do, at least for beginners. (Senior professionals had access to equivalent solutions, before everyone else got excited.)
2. More people are now programmers. (We laid a bunch of them off, and we meant to not hire any back, but it turned out that our backlog of cool/revolutionary/necessary ideas was more important to leadership than pinching pennies.)
3. A lot of work that was previously ignored completely now gets done, but done very badly by brand new programmers. (We asked the senior developers to do it, but they said “Fuck you, that’s not important, make the new kid do it.” I think they’re just still cranky that we spent three years laying off staff instead of training…)
4. The average quality of all software is now a bit worse, but there’s a lot more variety of (worse) software now available.

Yeah. A “DevOps” is just a “sysadmin” who can pretend they don’t hate all developers for stretches of 20 minutes at a time. (I’m kidding. I know our SysAdmins love us… In their own secret ways.)

was told we’d do it in excel/vba instead, still unhappy.

I just threw up in my mouth a little. Fifteen years ago, “I’ll stick to Excel” was a (bad, but) defensible position in data automation. Today that’s just insanity.

Yeah. I, like most leaders, spent some time learning all that crap. It was awful and worse than useless.

Google and Meta’s secrets are recruiting top talent to for top dollars, and then buying every start up that threatens their empire. There’s no secrets to great management to be had there.

I just threw out my copy of “product engineering at Google”.

That’s the beauty of programming (and lots of skills, really) - once we master the basics, all we tend to notice is what we haven’t learned yet.

It’s hard on our confidence, but there’s also a perverse beauty to it.

It is a big leap, but it’s the kind of leap that gets easy when doing the job with training for dozens of hours per week.

And it’s also a very small leap compared to the average computer user who doesn’t know why smoke shouldn’t come out of the computer case during normal operation.

One of the cool things that AI will do is once again lower the barrier of entry for full time programmers.

We’re on our way to finding out just how terrible AI is as a pilot, but it makes a damn fine co-pilot much of the time. And it’ll be key in welcoming in and enabling our next batch of brilliant full time programmers.

Labyrinth is a world where wishes come true, especially sexually charged but confused ones.

So I think your logic is spot on.

But not good enough to get a job as a programmer.

This is as weird of a time for getting hired as a programmer as we have ever had. Hang in there. Once we let AI deployment pipelines start causing production outages and shareholder bankruptcies, we will start falling over ourselves to hire human programmers again.

After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid “still don’t know enough” out of 10.

That resonates so thoroughly.

And while it can 100% also be the case in any tool or language, it’s somehow 300% true for C and C++.

Yeah. I agree it’s rough to lose existing recognition, but I think the test in the name was hurting adoption quite a bit.

When I tried mineTest last, I was thinking, “what the hell, this will amuse me for an afternoon.”

I did not expect a feature complete game engine with a better more polished game than vanilla MineCraft.

Yes. MineClone (the 2nd(?) most popular game for the MineTest/Lunatic Luanti engine recently renamed.)

Nice!

I’m still struggling to get good at BASIC, myself.

BASIC was my first language, and I still don’t feel like I’ve mastered it, so I still study it on some weekends.

I take so many modern tools for granted, now. It makes my learning progress in BASIC feel slow.

But I’m getting better at it.

I don’t have any free time because I have young kids.

That’s a healthy thing to acknowledge.

It’s a brutal phase for professional development, hobbies, free time, sex, basic housekeeping…

It gets better as the little ones grow.

But I still mostly learn by suffering.

That resonates so much. Almost every time someone is deeply impressed with something I know, it brings back a painful memory of how I learned it.

how do you rate yourself in your most used language?

I know things that no human should have to carry the knowledge of

Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?

My soul is scarred by the nuanced minutia of many an RFC.

in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.

There’s but two types in software - those who have lived to see too much…and those who haven’t…yet.

I know things look rough right now, but TFG is really old and a lot of us will live long enough to piss on his grave, if we eat right and exercise.

specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have, refine, etc,

Make stuff. Keep making stuff. Publish your source code, even the shitty stuff. Maybe especially the shitty stuff, since that tends to be more interesting. Be ready to talk about it (humbly) during job interviews.

as well as some looser guidance and direction after losing my confidence.

Hang in there. The industry is in a fuck around phase right now where we bet that AI will be an acceptable substitute for good old fashioned recruitment.

Another “find out” phase is on the horizon - where we fall over ourselves to recruit anyone who can code to undo our stupidity before we go out of business. (Or to quickly capitalize on market gaps left by our competitors who went out of business.)

Do any of you have experience with services like this?

I’ve gotten my mentorship a few places:

• Community college classes and workshops.
• The #python IRC (Internet Rely Chat) channel on FreeNode.org (it’s free)
• Channels (mostly YouTube) full of free recordings of programming conference recordings.
• Networking through volunteering to teach what I know at Libraries and Makerspaces
• Occasionally taking lower paying jobs to spend time working with someone known to me to be an excellent mentor.
• Professional Programming Conferences (once I could get employers to pay my way)

Rust’s borrow checker may be annoying at times, but it forces you to think about ownership and prevents you from stuffing statefulness where it shouldn’t be.

That does sound pretty cool.

is very hard to create a good inheritance structure that does not devolve over time as new requirements get added

That’s such an important point. Whatever else folks take from this thread, I hope they catch that.

And I’ll pile on to add - more layers is more risk. One layer of inheritance is a lot easier to keep maintaining than inheritance that goes four layers deep.