It’s kind of interesting the variety of people software engineering (press F to pay respects) attracted. There were some clearly really great engineers who in practice only really cared about the end result, and I guess in some ways you could tell that from their code. I always agonised over my code, how to make it better, not just the end result. For whatever reason I strived toward simple, elegant APIs with good documentation - that was as important to me as the end product
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I’m sure there are some sea lions who would pop up and say “ah but you use (insert IDE / engine / library), how interesting” (steepled fingers, face begging you to punch it)
Well imaginary dickhead, these are things I can mitigate. I can use different IDEs or just a text editor. My engine and libs are built from source and I’m comfortable reading / modifying the code. I always have an “out”, I’m not wholly dependent on any one thing. It’s never perfect but it’s better than outsourcing
The other thing for me is that there is no “story” to creating something with GenAI, same as there’s no “story” to going to the supermarket and buying cornflakes (barring unusual events, pls reply with your badass cornflake story if so). Humans are all about stories, it’s pretty much why we care about anything. “I prompted and got this” just isn’t interesting. “I learned a skill and made this with it” is infinitely more interesting because you can’t help but infuse your personality into it
We all intuitively know that efficiency for the sake of it is fecking boring. Unless it’s attached to making pounding tech demos or making cars go really fast, just being more efficient at something sucks the story out of it. It’s why Frodo & Sam couldn’t just get the eagles to fly them to Mordor. No journey, no space for events along the way, fecking boring story. And it’s the same for creating. Doing it faster with less personality is optimising the wrong thing.
I’m also a control freak. I *have* to know how things work, so if they go wrong I know I can fix them. My worst nightmare is having to support a system in production that I don’t (and maybe can’t) *truly* understand. That there’s a point beyond which I’m out of options
Unfortunately* these things make my personality type not compatible with AI / agentic development *at all*.
*depending on your perspective