The Programmer Identity Crisis

Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?

>The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives

They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately

The point is, a lot of us aren't convinced reviewing 8 meals made by agents in parallel _is_ producing better food.

And it also seems exceedingly wasteful to boot.

I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I really like using knives!"), not really about whether the food is better.

I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.

A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?

But what if the New Way to prepare food was to put a box into a microwave , wait 60 seconds, then hand it to the customer?

Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?

This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster was going on about knives, forgetting that the final product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food is inferior, then the food is inferior.

Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!

I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?

But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?

If that's your analogy, then shouldn't you be able to dominate the market by not using AI?

Ok then throw a frozen meal from the supermarket into the microwave and be done with it.

Outcome is really the same, right? Why waste all that effort on a deep understanding of how to prepare food?

Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have been able to happen without the decade of experience it took you to get to the Staff level engineering position at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the skills required to review the AI code you're producing properly.

There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.

The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...

You'll be doing fine too, just doing other work.

And you can see it coming so there is plenty of time to prepare.

Totally true. But that's also a different point than "But I love using my knives!"

Absolutely true. In my case, I'm trying to run a restaurant, so this is all excellent news for me.

I genuinely don't think it's hard to compete. I use AI sometimes, I don't use it more than I use it. I find myself at least just-as-productive as people who primarily use AI.

I personally tire of people acting like it's some saving grace that doubles/triples/100x your productivity and not a tool that may give you 10-20% uplift just like any other tool

I thought it's interesting that GPT5's comments (on prompting it for feedback on the article) seem to overlap with some of the points you guys made:

   My [GPT5's -poster's note] take / Reflections
   
   I find the article a useful provocation: 
   it asks us to reflect on what we value in being programmers.
   
   It’s not anti-AI per se, but it is anti-losing-the-core craft.
   
   For someone in your position (in *redacted* / Europe) 
   it raises questions about what kind of programming work you want: 
   deep, challenging, craft-oriented, or more tool/AI mediated.
   
   It might also suggest you think about building skills 
   that are robust to automation: e.g., architecture, 
   critical thinking, complex problem solving, domain knowledge.
   
   The identity crisis is less about “will we have programmers” and 
   more “what shapes will programming roles take”.

Cheap, fast, mechanised food provision does dominate the market. For price reasons

Nevertheless there's still a luxury market for hand prepared food.

Perhaps software will evolve the same way

Absolutely. But, what if the point of using the knives, is to be able to understand how to use the machines which can use knives for us, and if we're not replicating the learning part, where do we end up?

Not really even for people running a restaurant. The fast food machine means that a dozen competitors can spring up to compete with most restaurant's niche overnight unless they are serving up something truly special. (And they're not because if they were, the fast food machine would be wholly inadequate to churn out their menu.) Success comes down to other factors like marketing and blind luck winning customers.

It's both. Speaking as a user, software quality was already declining before AI coding, but AI seems to have put that process on a fast track now (not the least because of all the top management drinking the Kool-Aid and deciding that they can replace the people they have with it).