LLM’s are inherently non-deterministic. In my anecdotal experience, most software boils down to an attempt to codify some sort of descision tree into automation that can produce a reliable result. So the “reliable” part isn’t there yet (and may never be?).

Then you have the problem of motivation. Where is the motivation to get better at what you do when your manager just wants you to babysit copilot and skim over diffs as quickly as possible?

Not a great epoch for being a tech worker right imo.

Where is the dignity in all of this?

That describes pretty much all of my "full-stack" experience.

What sort of job/background do you have where you are writing low level drivers? I'd love to get into that side of things but I don't know where to start.

This resonates with me.

I find that the current crop of new tech (AI) produces a lot of cognitive dissonance for me in my day-to-day work.

Most initiatives/projects/whatever around AI seems to be of the "digging your own grave" variety - making tools to replace software engineers.

Definitely not fun.

For example, if I define an alias thing, vim won't know about it.

But as a executable on my $PATH, I can do any of the following:

  :%!thing
  :'<'>!thing
  :.!thing

  #!/bin/sh
  python -m json.tool --indent 2

  :%!fmtjson

- AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up

- AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe

- AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst

- "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver"

- AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery

It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (broad) subject.

https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard/pr...

Question is, what can we do about it? Thats where I really start to feel powerless, the challenge seems insurmountable.

Going back to the earlier analogy, music has the same problem as programming in that the stuff you do for money doesn't necessarily translate to making you better at your craft. You end up being a factory that just produces the same thing over and over instead of growing in your craft.

I see this a lot at my job currently (I'm guilty of it as well) - speed is usually prioritized over anything else, and so bad patterns end up getting copied and "lifted and shifted" everywhere.

It's hard to find the balance.

When I was younger and more idealistic I took a chance and got a bachelor's in music. It didn't work out, but when I later became a programmer, one of things I took with me was this idea of "total immersion" - e.g. just hanging around and listening/watching the more experienced people do their thing.

Nice to see that I'm not alone in this idea!

Then, instead of informing them of best practices and giving them time to re-work the code, you'd just fire them?

Interesting strategy.

I'm not sure how to do this with a SpringBoot/NodeJs app that you would find in 90% of shops