alt Hacker News> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
It's very sad, for me.
Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.
If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games.
I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs.
It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them.
I don't see a solution here.
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I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't really have much ground to complain
I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing.
Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much.
I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.
I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context
My job for the last 8 years has involved
Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.
Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.
While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.