This is kind of a stream of consciousness so bear with me, I'm not really going anywhere with this, I just figured I'd put thoughts into text.
I've been programming for more than half of my life, first self taught then in uni then as a professional. I've always been passionate about it. I groking problems, implementing new things, tweaking, figuring out problems, solving the "puzzle". I love discovering new techs and using them. I've gone through so many different languages, platforms and it's always been mostly very fun, there's obviously always some things that suck like that one bug that you spend two weeks solving (I remember when I was implementing RC delegations it was making me go crazy at times).
But it was very rewarding, and ever since I started agentic coding about 8 months ago, I realized that I don't code anymore, I'm a reviewer or sometimes just a QA. I find a bug, I send claude to it, I submit a PR I get an AI generated response, I look at it, then feed it to another AI and wait for it to do the work. I'm much closer to a tech manager than a programmer anymore.
That's truly how I feel. I sit all day watching claude do stuff, steering it and not coding myself, because it's kind of pointless, agentic coding is so incredibly faster, if you don't like the way it's doing something, it's going to be faster to explain rather than refactor it yourself. The value add is no longer in programming, it's in architecture (which to be fair is still fun) reviewing / testing. Even learning new languages is now kind of pointless when every LLM is now fluent in all of them.
And that sucks.
Recently I picked up a programming game out of curiosity https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060160/The_Farmer_Was_Replaced/ (your task is to basically program a robot to farm) which got me to code meaningfully again (I mean programming for 4+ hours without the use of AI) and it made me realize how much I missed it. I missed the tinkering, I missed the "aha !" moment when you figure something out, I missed optimizing things, I missed building.
I'm not anti AI per se, you'd need to be blind to not see the massive productivity gains. And I'm glad we are able to accomplish so much more with so much less effort. But I'm sad that this is what it's become. There used to be real software craftsmanship. Big discussions in MRs with peers discussing solutions and other things, nowadays I feel like most of the time I'm interacting with an AI or talking to someone who's just a proxy for an LLM (regurgitating what it's telling him). I
And it makes me sad, because my job was my hobby and passion now it's just a job. It's like if I was a professional carpenter making chairs and suddenly the wooden 3d printer gets invented (eh not sure about the analogy but you get the idea). I wonder if this is how the early programmers felt when the compilers became mainstream.
Anyways I'm just rambling so I'll cut this short. You get the point. The times are evolving and I don't like it. I'm painting an extra gloom picture where a lot of it kind of isn't true, there's still value to programming yourself, domain knowledge is more important than ever because you need to fact check the bullshit, same thing for learning the language your LLM is writing in, don't nitpick on the details, it's more of a global sentiment.
edit: Lol I tagged this "core" I am so used to posting exclusively about core dev that I forgot that I wrote something completely irrelevant
@howo