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Still an infinite amount to learn and do. It's still not hard to have more skill than an AI. Of course AI can solve all the dumbbell problems you get in school. They're just there to build muscle. Robots can lift weights better than you, too, but that doesn't mean there's no value in you doing it.

I experimented with GPT-5 recently and found its capabilities to be significantly inferior to that of a human, at least when it came to coding.

I was trying to give it an optimal environment, so I set it to work on a small JavaScript/HTML web application, and I divided the task into small steps, as I'd heard it did best under those circumstances.

I was impressed overall by how far the technology has come, but it produced a number of elementary errors, such as putting JavaScript outside the script tags. As the code grew, there was also no sense that it had a good idea of how to structure the codebase, even when I suggested it analyze and refactor.

So unless there are far more capable models out there, we're not at the stage where generative AI can match a human.

In general I find current model to have broad but shallow thinking. They can draw on many sources, which is extremely useful, but seem to have problems reasoning things through in depth.

All this is to say that I don't find the joy of coding to have gone at all. In fact, there's been a number of really thorny problems I've had to deal with recently that I'd love to have side-stepped, but due to the currently limitations of LLMs I had to solve them the old-fashioned way.

I'd argue you didn't lose the joy of coding, you lost the illusion that coding made you real, that it made you you.

Maybe I was lucky. For me, the joy was the power of coding. Granted, I'm not employed as a coder. I'm a scientist, and I use coding as a problem solving tool. Nothing I write goes directly into production.

What's gone is the feeling that coding is a special elite skill.

With that said, I still admire and respect the real software developers, because good software is more than code.

Of course in reality there’s weird economical mechanics where making the most money and building something that benefits the world don’t necessarily collide, but theres always demand for and joy in solving complex problems, even if its on a higher abstraction level than coding with your favorite language.

Sadly, there's very little I can do now. I don't have the financial means to meaningfully change careers now. Pretty much the only thing I could do now that pays somewhat well and doesn't require me to go to university again is teaching. I think I will ride this one out and end it when it ends.

If you find coding boring, explore the frontiers. You will find a lot of coding wilderness where no AI has trod.

AI is just one of those arms races that we imposed on ourselves, with desire to dominate others, or to protect ourselves from such domination. It is irreversible, just like the other things. It survives by using the same tactic of a cheap salesman - tell the first buyer that they can dominate the world, and then tell next buyers that they need to protect themselves from the first one.

We transformed our lifestyles to live with those unnecessary, business/politics driven "advancements". The saga continues.

BTW, electronic calculators, when they came up, did a similar thing, erasing the fun out of calculations by hand.

In each of these cases, lots of relatively low-value jobs were no longer needed and a few very-high-value jobs sprang into existence.

The author of the article loves coding. But software is about solving problems efficiently, not punching the keyboard. The other parts of the job might not be as fun for everyone, but they are even more valuable than typing code. Great programmers could always do both. Now they can focus on the higher value work more by leveraging tools that can do the lower-value work.

Work is not supposed to be fun. That’s why they pay you to do it. If it was fun, you would have to pay your employer. (Tongue in cheek advice).

They still need someone with higher reasoning skills (eg humans) to verify what they cough up. This need is likely to continue for quite some time (since LLMs simply aren't capable of higher reasoning).

Learning to code effectively using LLMs is probably the best path forward, from a career standpoint.

There was a time when you could walk in the door with a handful of proper nouns printed on a piece of paper. The low hanging fruit has all been collected by now. But, there is always fruit available higher up in the tree. It's just harder to get to. Most people don't know how to climb the tree. They say they can, or that they do it all the time, but they're usually full of shit. It takes a lot of practice and discipline to do this safely.

To be clear, the tree is the customer in this analogy. Your tech and tools are only useful in so far as they complete a valuable job for some party. Reselling value-added tools to other craftsmen is also a viable path, but you have to recognize that the most wizened operators tend to use the older and more boring options. Something that looks incredibly clever to a developer with 3 years of experience is often instantly disregarded by someone with 4 years of experience. The rate at which you stop being a noob is ideally exponential.

I often look back on the things I thought were absolutely mandatory from a technology standpoint and feel really silly about much of it. I wish there was a better way to ramp developers without them causing total destruction. Right now it's like we're training electrician apprentices by having them work on HV switch gear at a nuclear power plant.

There is still a huge gap in ideas like apprenticeship in technology. Being able to code is such a tiny piece of the pie. Being able to engage in dialog with the non technical business owners such that your code has effect on target is ~ the rest of the pizza. A laser guided munition delivered from 60k feet will not be very useful if you don't know where it needs to go or how many targets there are. A lot of what I see on the HN front page is tantamount to carpet bombing the jungle non-stop in hopes of jostling an apple out of a tree somewhere.

That being said, we untalented programmers are experiencing what most jobs suffered in the last 2 centuries: massive automation of their everyday activities. I especially identify with these traditional farmers who took their life as their way of life was wiped out by artificial fertilizers, mechanic, chemicals and hyperscaling.

1) you are using coding assistant too much - you aren't yet ready for the Senior role that requires. Advice: chill out with that and get back to coding solo

or

2) you haven't used coding assistant enough to realize it's an idiot savant grade Junior to Mid programmer. Advice: use coding assistant more and then see #1

Real talk: all moments suck and all moments are wonderful. Source: have lived through few computer moments.

What a time to be alive!

Good things to look forward to are:

- Lean and mathlib revolutionizing math

- Typst replacing latex and maybe some adobe prosuc

- Fuschia/Redox/wasi replacing Unix

- non-professional-programmers finally learning programming en mass

I think the latter is maybe the most profound. Tech may not grow at a break-neck pace, but erasing the programmer vs computer illiterate dichotomy will mean software can way the world in much less Kafkaesque ways.

Coding was incredibly fun until working in capitalist companies got involved. It was then still fairy fun, but tinged by some amount of "the company is just trying to make money, it doesn't care that the pricing sucks and it's inefficient, it's more profitable to make mediocre software with more features than really nail and polish any one part"

Adding on AI impacts how fun coding is for me exactly how they say, and that compounds with company's misaligned incentives.

... I do sometimes think maybe I'm just burned out though, and I'm looking for ways to rationalize it, rather than doing the healthy thing and quitting my job to join a cult-like anti-technology commune.

I started coding in the 70s, loved it then, still love it now and LOVING the emergence of Gen AI tools.

For perspective, the IT industry went through a similar change with the emergence of search engines ~30 years ago. At that time, a big part of the value of a software "expert" was in their ability to remember and recall lots of info (most of it of dubious value, to be fair). These experts usually had shelves of well-thumbed books on all sorts of topics, and could recall obscure info from these books seemingly at will. With the emergence of AskJeeves, AltaVista and eventually Google, suddenly nobody needed to remember anything OR even know where to find it - with a simple search, you could get nearly all the info you needed.

I can still remember the panicked response to this brutal change from the senior IT people I worked with at the time...

Did the demand for skilled developers dry up? No

Nor did it end with

- introduction of COBOL (designed so that non-coders could write code),

- PCs (surely leading to the end of systems programming as a career),

- spreadsheets (so accountants no longer needed programmers),

- 4GLs (designed to greatly simplify coding; report writing in particular),

- Visual BASIC (so the world would no longer need C programmers; anyone could learn to write BASIC),

- Microsoft SQL Server (nobody would need mainframe databases any more, so all those mainframe jobs would disappear)

- object oriented coding (all those code reuse possibilities! Very quickly programming should devolve to just glueing together other peoples' code),

- open source (because inevitably any tool of value would soon have a competitor that was free, destroying the value proposition of companies that wrote software to sell),

- Linux (how could Windows compete with free? Shed a tear for all those soon-to-be-unemployed Windows experts)

- NoSQL (because the need for "legacy" databases like Oracle, DB2, Postgres, MySQL etc. would surely go away) - etc., etc., etc.

The reality is that you still need a grounding in software development to do coding well, even with AIs. I'm absolutely loving how quickly I can create solid code with the assistance of Gen AI - lots of tasks that used to take me a week I can now knock over in a few hours.

I also notice how many people are struggling with how to use Gen AI tools for coding tasks - my take is there's 2 distinct skills you need: knowledge of how to do software development well, and knowledge of how to use Gen AI tools for coding. Having the first doesn't automatically lead to the 2nd - you have to put in the time to learn about Gen AI, THEN work out how to fit Gen AI tools around your current workflow, THEN work out how to optimise the way you work with your new idiot savant buddy that has perfect recall.

That whole process (new tool appears -> learn about it -> work out how to fit it into my current workflow -> optimise my workflow) has basically been my entire career in a nutshell.

People have been predicting the demise of programmers for my entire career (40+ years now), and so far they've been wrong every time. For each new disruption that appears, the key has been to embrace it and adapt how you work accordingly.

Gen AI may indeed be different and kill off all programming careers overnight, but so far I'm not seeing it