Before I begin, I will admit that I am biased. I love programming and I don't want another program to write my programs for me. The truth is I that I would still program, if AI were to take all of our jobs. But I'd rather do this for a living. Also, I don't like what it implies. A whole host of people learning how to code wondering what is the point, or worse just becoming prompt engineers. That is not programming. Also, a fresh perspective only improves programming. If new people don't try the old things and wonder, why does this suck so much? Is there a better way to do this? Who will? Sure they might stumble onto some existing ideas that still work but they will also find new ways to do things. They will only do that if they have to go through the discomfort themselves. AI robs them of it.
Why do I love programming?
At it's very core, programming is permissionless. At least on the web. You can build your own X, even if it has been done before, just for it's own sake. To follow your own curiosity. You might build something useful or something just purely fun. Like the One million checkboxes website. I haven't built anything that is remotely that fun, but there are a few esoteric things that I have built that were not really useful, just me being curious about something. I probably won't even remember what some of those things were but they exist, and I built them.
Like the one I built very recently, where you can run this very same blog on the terminal by running ssh terminal.seagin.me
. The colors are not quite there yet, but I kinda think I know why. Getting a SSH app to run on a server that is publicly accessible was quite the challenge for me. As I never even thought it was something that would be possible. But here it is, in an unknown corner of the Internet. Waiting to be SSH'ed into.
Why would I give it away?
There was similar quote about attention from some book that I can't remember the name of. Frankly I don't even remember the quote. All I know is that it went along the lines of, your autonomy won't be taken away but rather you will be giving it away. I read this in another post, which I can't seem to find either. Along a similar strand, I feel like I was giving away my ability to program when I was using Copilot last year. Sometimes an active effort is required to avoid atrophy. So recently, I've been looking into my crutches and considering if I really needed them. It has been not the easiest to work without auto complete for the last week or so, but I do find myself paying more attention to every line of code that I read or write. Just because I need to.
AI for productivity, is it better? I'm not really sure. I'm really skeptical of it. Am I better programmer without it? Hell yea! I have a better understanding of how to make programs do stuff, better understanding of the language and my tools. Will I be more productive than someone who writes code using tools like Copilot? Don't care, but I'm pretty sure over a long enough time line these things will add up. Unless AI gets so good that, it won't matter either way.
Have fun programming.