Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now.

I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding.

It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it.

For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN.

Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.

Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track.

So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.

At one hand you get insane productivity boost, something that could take maybe days, weeks or months to do now you can do in significantly shorter amount of time, but how much are you learning if you are at a junior level and not consciously being careful about how you use it, feels like it can be dangerous without a critical mindset, where you eventually rely too much on it that you can't survive without it. Or maybe this is ok? Perhaps the way of programming in the future should be like this, since we have this technology now, why not use it?

Like there's a mindset where you just want to get the job done, ok cool just let the llm do it for me (and it's not perfect atm), and ill stitch everything together fix small stuff that it gets wrong etc, saves alot of time and sure I might learn something in the process as well. And then the other way of working is the traditional way, you google, look up on stackoverflow, read documentations, you sit down try to find out what you need and understand the problem, code a solution iteratively and eventually you get it right and you get a learning experience out of it. Downside is this can take 100 years, at the very least much longer than using an llm in general. And you could argue that if you prompt the llm in a certain way, it would be equivalent to doing all of this but in a faster way, without taking away from you learning.

For seniors it might be another story, it's like they have the critical thinking, experience and creativity already, through years of training, so they don't loose as much compared to a junior. It will be closer for them to treat this as a smarter tool than google.

Personally, I look at it like you now have a smarter tool, a very different one as well, if you use it wisely you can definitely do better than traditional googling and stackoverflow. It will depend on what you are after, and you should be able to adapt to that need. If you just want the job done, then who cares, let the llm do it, if you want to learn you can prompt it in certain way to achieve that, so it shouldn't be a problem. But this sort of way of working requires a conscious effort on how you are using it and an awareness of what downsides there could be if you choose to work with the llm in a certain way to be able to change the way you interact with the llm. In reality I think most people don't go through the hoops of "limiting" the llm so that you can get a better learning experience. But also, what is a better learning experience? Perhaps you could argue that being able to see the solution, or a draft of it, can be a way of speeding up learning experience, because you have a quicker starting point to build upon a solution. I dunno. My only gripe with using LLM, is that deep thinking and creativity can take a dip, you know back in the day when you stumbled upon a really difficult problem, and you had to sit down with it for hours, days, weeks, months until you could solve that. I feel like there are some steps there that are important to internalize, that LLM nowdays makes you skip. What also would be so interesting to me is to compare a senior that got their training prior to LLM, and then compare them to a senior now that gets their training in the new era of programming with AI, and see what kinds of differences one might find I would guess that the senior prior to LLM era, would be way better at coding by hand in general, but critical thinking and creativity, given that they both are good seniors, maybe shouldn't be too different honestly but it just depends on how that other senior, who are used to working with LLMs, interacts with them.

Also I don't like how LLM sometimes can influence your approach to solving something, like perhaps you would have thought about a better way or different way of solving a problem if you didn't first ask the LLM. I think this could be true to a higher degree for juniors than seniors due to gap in experience when you are senior, you sort of have seen alot of things already, so you are aware of alot of ways to solve something, whereas for a junior that "capability" is more limited than a senior.