The Programmer Identity Crisis

Thank you, author. This essay made my day. It resonates with my thinking of last months. I tried to use AI at work, but most of times I regrettably scratched whatever it did and did stuff on my own. So many points I agree with. Delegating thinking to AI is the worst thing I can do to my career. AI at best is mediocre text generator.

So funny to read how people attack author using non-related to the essay’s message criticism.

The worst thing for me is that I am actually good at LLM-based coding

My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks. Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important corner case and so on.

Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being neurodivergent has given me decades of practice in working with entities that have a different way of thinking that me own. I have more mechanical empathy for the LLM because I don't confuse it for a human. My coworkers meanwhile get super frustrated that the LLM can not read their mind.

That said, LLMs are getting better. My advantage will not last. And the more AI slop gets produced the more we need LLMs to cope with all the AI slop in our code bases. A vicious cycle. No one will actually know what the code does. Soon my job will mostly consist of praying to the machine gods.

It seems to me that someone like you, seen from the outside (e.g. from a code-reviewing colleague), simply appears to be getting more productive, with no drop in quality. Maybe some stylistic shifts.

I don't think anyone is complaining about that too much. I wonder how many people there are like you, where we don't get much data. If people don't complain about it, we generally don't hear about it, because they're just quietly moving on with their work.

Not to be confused with the AI hypesters who are loudly touting the benefits with dubious claims, of course (: