blinkbat
5 hours ago
it's kind of the difference between a studio musician and a songwriter. one you're doing for a paycheck, and you may or may not enjoy the work to varying degrees. the other is your passion.
LLMs are freeing companies to produce faster, but your expertise is still needed to supervise them for now.
coding in your spare time as a passion project is likely the outcome for many engineers who like the craft.
you might go as far as separating environments, or even whole machines, for your passion. keep a machine with NO ai options available to push you to code solutions by hand, etc.
blinkbat
5 hours ago
but all of that said, when is the last time you TRULY solved an entire codebase by hand? no stackoverflow, no google, no intellisense, no autocomplete (hell, no asking other engineers)?
umang-sinha
5 hours ago
long time man. i think around a year. i don't really remember tbh. but it has been a really really long time
blinkbat
5 hours ago
same here, of course. so in a sense, LLMs are just the next phase of a gradual erosion, not a total sea change.
umang-sinha
5 hours ago
and it is upto us to resist the erosion
umang-sinha
5 hours ago
coding as a passion project in a separate environment is an interesting idea.
almost like deliberately creating a space where the struggle is allowed to exist again.
the challenge though would be finding out time for my passion. if i'm not able to do that then only i am the one to blame