The Programmer Identity Crisis

This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. Programming has received a special treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need not.

Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the software productive process.

It is better to come to terms with this reality sooner rather than later in my opinion.

This is so funny to me.

Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

Did an AI write your post or did you "hand write it"?

Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do. Auto complete wasn't a huge time saver because writing code wasn't the bottleneck then and it definitely is not the bottleneck now. How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce. Specially if you pretend you're just doing "superior prompting with no hand coding involved".

LLMs are awesome but the IDE didn't replace the console text editor, even if it's popular.

> Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do.

And yet after 3 decades in the industry I can tell you this fantasy exists only on snarky HN comments.

> Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

hand-coding is 100% not the future, there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore (I help with one of them that used to have 19 "hand-coders" :) ). The typing for sure will get phased out. it is quite insane that it took "AI" to make people realize how silly and wasteful is to type characters into IDEs/editors. the sooner you see this clearly the better it will be for your career

> How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce.

if it doesn't you need to spend more time and learn and learn and learn more. 4/6/8 terminals at a time doing all various things for you etc etc :)