Post #1179982

I'm giving up on programming related professional development in the evenings. I've started to learn Mandarin, instead. Yes, this is driven by disillusionment with the industry, in large part thanks to AI. Professional development in evenings feels pointless. For 6 years coding has been my main special interest, and because I discovered programming in my 30s, I've also felt a pressure to catch up, learn, fill in gaps. I like the process of writing code. I like the literal typing out of the words and symbols. I enjoy 'thinking by doing'. It was the same when I did lots of observational drawing as an animation student. There's a connection between mind and fingers that stimulates my brain like crazy. That specific feeling of creating something is NOT the same as iterating with an agent or plain old LLM. I'm not saying using them makes you stupid, and I like what @grimalkina has been doing with her Claude skills in that respect (you can listen to her [podcast ep](https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/18692591-you-can-learn-with-ai) about it), I'm just saying they're qualitatively different experiences for me. I don't enjoy coding with agents very much. It's kind of hollow. I'm still in charge and have to do most of the planning, yes, so I'm still thinking about stuff. But again, it's not the same kind of thinking. It's missing the part that relies on the doing. The other thing is, and this may get me crucified because I'm saying it aloud on the fediverse, but, models are way, way, way better than they were even 18 months ago. They were pathetically bad. A waste of time. Now, if you work in Python and all you need is something a mid-level developer could understand and work with, an agent in your IDE using one of the latest models can probably do it (with lots of guidance). I also think it's also reasonable that the outcomes of using them will get even better, if for no other reason than clever people will improve how we interact with them and add extra tooling about important things, like correctness of code outputs. I'm a very valuable programmer to have in a team, but I'll only ever be mid at the actual programming. So all told, the magic is gone and I no longer feel an impetus to keep up. Maybe one day I can be mid at speaking Mandarin, as well as programming.