Ai orVibe coding and general existential questions

[Kirl]

Hey all, long time no see!

I just watched this video on yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqqPOky-Nv8

I share his sentiments on coding now and I feel the same about my graphics skills. The ai of today and especially tomorrow just took out most of the fun i had figuring things out. I was wondering how you guys feel about this.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the potential of ai (and i’m using it for many things) and I always knew these days would come, but I do now exist in this existential dread that none of our skills matter anymore…

I’m really interested how you guys feel about this.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I occasionally use it as a sounding board but yeah, if programming is about self expression then how much of your self are you really expressing when the LLM is burping out all the answers for you?
I may give it occasionally something trivial to implement or ask it for an algorithm (and for heaven's sake double and triple check it) but it's not a major player in my recreational programming.

Now, as far as the corporate world, I came from there.
And to roughly quote Tsoding, there is very little programming left in the corporate world.
Those guys are mostly writing glue code and many can't design much from scratch.

So, it doesn't bother me as much because there is little REAL programming there anymore.
I strongly feel that the hard and interesting stuff is now being done for free and companies are just slurping up Open Source stuff damaging employing those kinds of "real programmers".
Now my Wendy's App was showing upside down and many websites are a terrible mess as vibrators vibrate out the new vibe code. SO yeah, we are suffering indirectly.
The real cost of course will be all the technical debt LLMs cause because they can often fail to catch disasterious edge cases. And this new generation of code vibrators don't have the expertise to catch subtle edge cases.

Anyway that's about my $6 for what should be 2 cents.

[Shockwave]

I use GenAI daily at work for all kinds of tasks which stretch far beyond writing code - It is a company expectation and I'd simply be unable to manage my workload without these tools now, such is the impact it has had. Over my career I've seen that software engineering is an incredibly fast moving profession and over the last 40 years I've seen many huge leaps, here are some which stood out to me;

- Moving from DOS to GUI based OS
- Version control (SVN / GIT)
- Build tools - Apache ANT, Maven, Gradle
- CI / CD - Bitbucket, Jenkins
- Waterfall - Agile

Each of these shifts have changed the landscape, GenAI feels bigger than all of this, in my current role as an engineering manger and in my previous role as a lead engineer, I'm seeing it changing team structures and how we think about creating new features (e.g. does incremental delivery like Agile even make sense when LLMs work better when you give them the full facts up front). What about tech debt now? Is it as important when you can just ask Claude to find the bugs and make all the tests pass.

I've never had a problem accepting change, it's part of the industry and why IT professionals are highly paid. My job is to make money for my company and improve services for it's customers. I do this by delivering software through my engineering team and making sure that they have the relevant skills needed to do so.

If you're working in IT outside the demoscene, as a hiring manager I would say resisting the change to GenAI is harmful to your career / financial wellbeing - There's very little option really unless you want to work somewhere niche.

As far as my own hobbies, I still enjoy coding without many of the constraints so I still write minecraft plugins and gfx routines and in fact I'm waiting for my new Spectrum Next soon so I can make demos on it without GenAI or Version Control or Unit tests or CI/CD 

There will always be avenues for people who want to code closer to the hardware.

I tend to avoid GenAI outside work as much as I can but with my corporate hat on, I'm fully on board.