Musing about the future of my profession

With the rise of LLMs (and even mandatory AI), I’ve been thinking about what could be done, to lay my own path for the future. By “my own path”, I mean “not the path decided by the current zeitgeist” which is “learn to prompt or be left behind”.

For me, the bottom line with vibe coding (coding with AI) is:

• When LLMs are wrong, they are a pain in the back to work with.
• When LLMs are right, they steal the joy of learning and challenging myself.

I’d rather be a 1X engineer and fucking enjoy solving everyday problems, that be a 100X engineer being bored to death making rich-enough arses richer.

@kerrick replied:

I, too, foresee myself being the coding equivalent of a historical society volunteer who churns butter at the local museum for the sheer joy of doing the task manually and teaching others how it used to be done.

But it seems like my options will be to either:

• Do this on nights & weekends
• Retire before it hurts my career

Yeah, like some last Fremen from the end of Leto II reign. Ghosts of their former selves. Not even conscious of having been left behind.

I think we (developers) would gain some measure of independence by using the chaos around our profession to move past “useful technical cogs” to something else.

Dunno what exactly yet, but it looks a lot like when I was a stained-glass maker. The shops which managed to live past economic turmoils, were those who had transitioned from “plain restorer” to either “we do artistic collabs with cool artists” or “we built a knowledge base for topic X”.

I also see more smaller companies benefiting from the struggle. And developers benefiting from these new teams.

TBC…