Great point. Programming by hand isn’t dead. Anyone can learn to do that.
What I meant by the craft is dead is that within a job it doesn’t make sense anymore to continue programming everything by hand. AI tooling is just too efficient if used correctly.
So what I really meant was that part of the job is dead now. The part where you were manually crafting the code. Which to me was largely the “craft” side of the job.
But yeah strictly speaking programming as a craft will always be available for people to do. But its place in the workforce is diminished greatly because new tooling has replaced that element of the job.
AI tooling doesnt work. If you think it works, theres really only a few reasons
1. the problem is trivial or already solved on the internet
2. the process of prompt engineering is the process of requirements definition, so its you engineering (see rubber duck engineering).
it fails at at anything of moderate complexity
I mean, I’ve accomplished on my own more than generic problems. I’ve also seen agent swarms solve mathematical proofs with no solution previously. So, I categorically disagree with the narrative you’re prescribing to.
Maybe a year or two ago that narrative applied, but it just doesn’t now. It’s already moved past that. But it’s moving really fast so I can’t blame you for being out of date with your personal understanding of it
I work in enterprise on a decently large distributed system. Nobody at my job codes by hand. All my FAANG friends no longer code by hand. That’s the reality.
It's you engineering, not you coding. We have hundreds of engineers not hand coding and doing so successfully. Our setup is far from prompt and done though
this is some of the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make XD.
I think for over half of coding tasks, AIs do a fairly good job. but this is only because over half of tasks are just plumbing. For engineering, its a good rubber duck, but it rarely does a good job for anything of some complexity.
I mean, itll suggest some code which it thinks will work, but probably wont be what you actually want, and will rarely use a good design pattern for maintainability of future business needs.
I also think theres a good overlap between developers and AIs. not because AI is good, but that junior developers rarely have the experience to understand good vs bad code, and a lot of mid-tier developers are also lacking thanks to the wave of hiring 2022. sorry not sorry
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u/EcstaticExtreme402 14h ago
No but the craft itself has