Why is that a better choice? With respect to career prospects?

I have coworkers who report learning a lot about some system by using Claude to do things they would not be able to do on their own, and subsequently seeing more about how the system works.

I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.

Meanwhile, Japanese monks are dismantling shinto temples piece by piece and rebuilding them piece solely so every future generation will know how it’s done.

A few of that generation will be drawn to understand the inner workings, thoroughly, from the very basics and first principles. Because they need to. For inexplicable reasons. They are the George Platen of the 2030s.

There was no economically justifiable reason for me to learn about compilers, operating systems, and even CMOS VLSI. But I couldn't be satisfied writing software without knowing how those things worked. I taped out a chip in which all the polygons drawn by deterministic software I'd eithe written or understood. No place+route. It was the 2000s version of non-AI coding in the 2030s -- standard cell placement is essentially gradient descent.

Some people just have to know how it works.

Oh boy[1], do I have[2] articles[3] for[4] you[5].

The history of, 'No one will know how to do anything and the industry will collapse' is almost as old as programming itself.

1 Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (EWD 498, 1975) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498...

2. John Backus, "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III" (1978) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800025.1198345

3. Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...

4. Alan Perlis, "Epigrams on Programming" (1982) Specifically #93 https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf

5. Joel Spolsky, "The Perils of JavaSchools" (2005) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

Is it so surprising that people who work in other domains and specialties may have different experiences than you?

People write code for all sorts of reasons, it's not a monolithic or uniform activity.

i get paid $300k cash to write all my code by hand. and this is at an AI-pilled company with a CEO pushing AI every day.

boss doesn't know or care. i just get plus perf reviews and raises so it's chill. my perf reviews are actually trending up since opus 4.5 so i'm feeling good actually.

i think smart people crave an adult in the room in these infantile psychotic times

What has your code base ended up looking like? Is there a coherent abstraction hierarchy?

I keep checking back on LLMs every couple months and while they are now great for figuring out bugs in a system I don’t know much about (say in my use of a framework I’ve never used before), it’s been super helpful. But whenever I have it write a lot of code, even in a not huge project, it mostly works but it’s like a gum and popsicle stick machine gun and I’m scared of what large org code bases will look like in a few years.

10x really isn't hyperbole at this point

And I have always found that a little hollow, and depressingly capitalist within tech. Outside of tech, people who nearly exclusively value end-results are the same people taking pictures of their food, and the same people who can't sit in silence, or get irritable when a hike hasn't blessed them with a view yet. For me, it's almost always been the journey, and the result is just an ephemeral blip while work continues iteratively.

Sure, automating away things that would otherwise just be basically copy/pasted anyway have always been fine, but this is a very different scale.

It is interesting how people can differ in terms of disposition though.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that one disposition is better or worse than another objectively, but rather that I subjectively find impatient, superficial, consumption-driven people extremely dull, which I also tend to associate with people who mostly care about the result. Additionally, I believe that this focus on the production of more and faster is a non-trivial contribution to producing things that have no longevity or are otherwise enshittified. The less we're involved in the intimate details of a thing, the less we're inclined to care, and the less it's even acceptable to care about quality.

I'm very curious to see how the "building codes are first written in blood" will play out in the software world.

Learn to cod... er... do plumbing?

What jobs do non-programmers do?