for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone.

[vashbear@hachyderm.io]

@mntmn

Hi Lucie, I love the sentiment. I do think it is important to understand what good coding is, and coding is enjoyable.

But... sorry, I have a "but"

I am an experieced 30 year coder. The truth is that the best human coder cannot keep up with what AI coding can do. I was shocked when I realized this but it's true.

AI can keep the entire code base in its buffer and scan and find things instantly that I would not know. It can refactor, debug and redeploy. It can generate documentation instantly. Any API, even ones I have never seen to some esoteric endpoint, it can master instantly. it has been trained billions and billions of lines of code. That is more than I have by a factor of over 100,00 million.

It is like having a team of 10 cross-disciplinary developers working with you plus a documentation writer , a QA person and project manager.

If I have a question about how something works, I can ask it, and it describes it and gives me links to the relevant section.

It is only getting better. Every few months its capabilities leap incredibly.

It still needs a team leader. It needs someone to guide what it can do. That is the role to embrace. You will be a much better team leader if you understand the fundamentals.

Believe me, I understand that there are plenty of downsides to this. And .. it scares the hell out of me. But wishing it were not so will not make it go away.

I dont know if you have tried the most recent releases - I use Claude Code -- but you owe it to yourself to try it if only to gauge what you are up against.

And by all means -- keep learning to code on your own -- but if that is the only tool in your quiver, it should be a hobby, not a means to make a living.

[jrdepriest@infosec.exchange]

@mntmn

The automation platform I spend most of my time in let's me use in-line Python, jq, and JSONPath. They have little AI boxes so it can do it for you. I refuse to use them and quite enjoy writing my own, reading stackoverflow, reading documentation, and doing iterative testing.

I used to hate jq and found it unintuitive. Now it's one of my favorite things to hack around in and I get really excited when I find a novel solution that lets me replace ten steps and two loops with one carefully crafted command.

And I'm finally taking a Python class after a decade of always meaning to.

I want to know why and how the things I put name on actually work.

[krono@toot.berlin]

@mntmn This makes everything you do even more enjoyable for me :)

[mahadevank@mastodon.social]

@mntmn Same club. I only use AI for snippets of code - which of course, I have to then edit quite a bit to bring it to good shape.

I mostly use it for stuff I'm new to, like Vimscript. Speaking of which Vim here - it has been my editor of choice for more than 20 years now, so the habit runs deep.

[nicolaottomano@mastodon.uno]

@mntmn
My 2 cents. As a former programmer and fountain pens collector, manually written code will be a thing of the past in, maybe, 5 years. Those manually writing code will do it for the pleasure of doing it, not for productivity. The same way we switched to PC to literally (no pun intended 🙂) write anything, relegating pens to the role of collector's items.