TikTok I have no knowledge of, but for sure seeing something like "Arab dude wearing suspicious looking outfit playing unknown instrument that I now have a name for playing a tune I did not know the name of but I do now says weird cultural thing that is highly specific to his or her locale but it kind of makes sense because of clues inside the video" is still very high-load compared to "I see a bird there that I do not care about in any way shape or form but I do remember it is blue".

I don't have to slog through yet _another_ way to sort, split, combine a list, open a file, show a UI component, handle events, logging, make data flow through some type of "database", serialize and deserialize endless things, implement yet another protocol in $whateverishotnow, managing authn, authz, the list is endless.

The interesting part of programming, for me, is deciding on and capturing the domain in a tight, surprisingly simple yet powerful architecture. This is hard - for me - and actually has very little to do with "programming" per se, meaning it has nothing to do with wrangling syntax/low-level semantics of whatever platform I'm on and fighting package managers to name just two highly depressing parts of my job. I don't like typing code. I am doing it my entire life and I still don't like it.

I like coming up with invariants and ways of guarding them. To find simple decompositions that turn a hairy, ungodly blob of a problem into a manageable almost trivial network of not-so-complicated things. The not-so-complicated things themselves.. I don't care in the slightest about them. Opening files, managing database connections, forms, the mechanics of i18n, typing the word "class", you name it. I find it exceedingly boring.

Perhaps I am more of the architect type, but I find managing a bunch of AIs and making sure they don't stray from My Path is easy on the mind. Programming works on my level of abstraction finally.

Staring at wall produces little information in and of itself, perhaps through reflection, but staring at a TV produces a load of information, most of which is useless like names of characters, their favorite dresses, what food is being eaten where, etc. You can learn a lot by just passively observing even "dumb" TV especially if it contains foreign content or skills like cooking or sports. Again, not saying all of it is relevant to your life, but that's a different issue.

I think many people here work at nice, large places with reasonable and knowledgeable colleagues that are cooperative and mostly rational and try to do the right thing. In my experience that is not a common or widespread thing. Of course I only have small to medium business experience, but that's still a pretty good chunk of the economy. LLMs are an absurd, ridiculous win in those kinds of environments.

There is quite a bit of skill to it, however. You cannot just take an AI from blank to "good code" without doing work. Yes, it takes work and quite a bit of it. By this I mean you have to write a good code style guide and a proper explanation of your architectural style(s), your preferences, your goals, plenty of examples, etc. Proper thought has to be put into this.

If you come across bad code, you need to investigate not castigate: why did this happen? How can we prevent this in the future? Those sort of processes need to become second nature. They actually should be already, because it's not that much different from managing a bunch of humans.

Humans come with lots of implicit knowledge and you also select them to match your company's style when you're hiring them. When they sit down at their keyboards you (and society) has already guided them towards a desirable path. (And even then they often still misfire.)

AI agents operate different. Their range of expression is completely alien to us. We cannot be both von Neumanns and complete morons. LLMs have no problem there. It takes a good while to get used to that.

Especially once you get to describe your abstractions in plain (or slightly technical) English instead of code I find it hard to say "programming" is being performed, but in many ways the case could be made that it remained the same and only the shape of the artifacts is different now.

It would explain a lot of misunderstanding between "programmers" though.

It might be that I have been doing this for too long and no longer see it.

But that is not programming then? Doing voice recognition in the 90s, missile guidance systems, you name it, those are hard things, but it's not the "programming" that's hard. It's the figuring out how to do it. The algorithms, the strategy, etc.

I might be misunderstanding, but I cannot see how programming itself can be challenging in any way. It's not trivial per se or quickly over, but I fail to see how it can be anything but mechanical in and of itself. This feels like "writing" as in grammar and typing is the hard part of writing a book.