Let Clankers do Clanker's Work.
Things change, sometimes they change over the years, sometimes they change unexpectedly, out of nowhere, some might say, and I do think that today it is common sense that the world we knew has changed quite a bit. We, as programmers, grew up chasing the frontier; faster machines, cleaner OSes, new languages. That "conqueror" itch is still there.
It feels quite weird to see the overall reaction to every nerd's wet dream coming true: a computer capable of listening and executing tasks given to it in plain English (or any natural language). But, as someone who kinda felt that something was off with all of this, I do understand the urge to seek meaning, or to ignore all of that with the excuse that it's just hype. But the reality is simple: what it meant to be a good engineer in the past, especially 4/5 years ago, does not hold anymore. The world has changed, forever. Writing code was, and still is, one of the most fun intellectual activities one can practice, it is just like solving small game puzzles, one at a time, but the best (of course, with some caveats) way of producing software is not explicitly tied to the act of hand-writing code, not anymore.
There is some kind of grief to be overcome, but personally I do think that we shall make it. Being too young to really appreciate all the past technological revolutions over the last decades makes me forget about how these things work. We, as a species, evolve by outsourcing task after task to our new abstraction machinery, and this is no different. Notice that I'm not advocating for being ignorant about your craft, I do think that understanding stuff is possibly one of the most valuable things to seek out, even more in this post-LLM world.
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
— Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, Chapter 5
As usual, we've been here before
I'm not that experienced in the field, and I wasn't yet alive (or at least conscious!) through the past technological revolutions to appreciate what we now take for granted, but we can all agree that things come and go, workflows change, necessities change, and this is true for us, even if we were to make the computer dance, that doesn't change the fact that we are susceptible to change as well, just like spreadsheets for finance/accounting or 3D software for physical engineering.
Notice the pattern, calculations (or computations) became cheaper, so modelling data and judgment became way more important. In a world with cheap intelligence, taste (read as high quality mental models) might matter more than ever. I'm not pretending to know how this all plays out, what I'm trying to say is that humanity's tooling will increasingly be, and behave, in a more sophisticated manner, but this very same tooling does not come as equalizers, but rather multipliers. Clankers did offer us leveled access, anyone with a 20-buck subscription can do a lot more, can learn at a faster pace, but the output is not equal, even in a world where intelligence is abundant. There are no leveled outcomes, so please, let clankers do clanker's work, and stop yelling at clouds.
