As a computer programmer, one of my greatest joys was achieving ‘flow state’ on a computer. It’s the time where you spend 8, 10, 12 hours locked onto your machine, headphones on, total focus. Time completely disappears and it’s just you and the code. You feel like a wizard who’s learn’t the spells to create magic with the machine. Everyone watches you with awe. You can do things so few can do. The feeling is potent - it’s what draws a lot of us back to the computer despite the frustration of solving hard problems, and an erroneous character preventing the program from compiling.
We’ve lost a lot of that feeling with AI. It certainly makes programming less fun for a lot of us. AI will eventually take our jobs too, I’m sure. Model improvements don’t make as much difference as the AI labs claim, but the tooling around the models is improving. Already, I can spin up a small program (under 15k loc) on a day, something that might have taken weeks prior. Small consulting jobs, low-complexity programming is almost redundant already.
Complex programming might last a little while longer. Enterprise code has difficult constraints and AI hasn’t solve it yet. I think this will go too though.
A piece of me grieves for what once was, but I tend to be very forward looking. Where to next? I crave the feeling of wizardry, but I don’t long for the technicality of code. I’m sure musicians feel it too. Probably painters, or other artists who’ve mastered the skills of their profession to the point where they can control the medium with their mind.
I want to work on hard things. I want to work on something that matters. I want to work on something new, something no one has ever seen before.
I’m not against AI, but if I’m going to use it I want that to be a medium not just ripping off existing work. Low-complexity programming is replaced by AI because it’s an embarrassingly solved problem. We’ve made a ton of websites, even Wix exists! What is truely new? And is code even the best medium for it?