The Programmer Identity Crisis

I absolutely loved this piece.

I also agree with comments on this thread stating that problem solving should be the focus and not the code.

However my view is that our ability to solve problems which require a specific type of deep thought will diminish over time as we allow for AI to do more of this type of thinking.

Purely asking for a feature is not “problem solving”.

I think you can enjoy both aspects - both the problem solving and the craft. There will be people who agree that of course from a rational perspective solving the problem is what matters, but for them personally the "fun" is gone. Generally people that identify themselves as "programmers" as the article does would be the people who enjoy problem solving/tinkering/building.

What if you want to be a better problem solver (in the tech domain)? Where should you focus your efforts? That's what is confusing to me. There is a massive war between the LLM optimists and pessimists. Whenever I personally use LLM tools, they are disappointing albeit still useful. The optimists tell me I should be learning how to prompt better, that I should be spending time learning about agentic patterns. The pessimists tell me that I should be focusing on fundamentals.