Yeah, this reads like cope. So, all software engineering? Then you must have a pretty narrow view of the problem space. Quite a lot of problems have a pretty well defined set of requirements that can fit on one page. It's the technical excellence that delivers on those requirements.
I have no idea how you would take what I wrote as an insult. It's insulting to me that people are paid 400k a year and still think that what I wrote is somehow NOT the baseline. It's not even a debate. I'm gonna take my own advice from the past and block HN for another 3 years and get back to work. Good luck.
I mean, sure, this comment sounds nice on a web forum, but some of us have 0 hesitance bucketing others on a scale of competence. Looking at the state of software I interact with on a daily basis, I really don't care about being nice anymore.
You know, reading these comments is absolutely hilarious. It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer. That's it. No, you're not capable of making something twice as fast if only you cared or had the time. If you haven't done it as a constant exercise, you can't.
I'm also more on the negative side because I'm really not convinced by the whole "AI will just automate/remove the boring aspects of life". Every single prototype capability of current AI points in the direction of a worst-case scenario of overall misery.
Yes, I've seen this behaviour on quite a few sites recently, like they're running a bitcoin miner or something. Here's another example: https://zed.dev/
I have no idea what they're doing to slow my machine down to a halt.
Ok, I'll be the bad guy and say that the linked demo on loom is just not impressive at all. It's just 10x slower than what a simple regex query would've answered. Again, I'll be the bad guy in this comment section, but ML-based search methods for code are just not that useful. They do sound nice for non-coders, that's about it.
I also feel like I'm qualified to say this because I have first-hand experience building code search tooling at scale.
Yes, I had to press "Try Again" a few times but, in general, the amount of stuff you can generate is staggering. It's also quite fun to ask it to "invent a programming language in the style of Rust and APL" for example. There's so much potential here...
ChatGPT is an absolute game changer. And I was very conservative with systems like GPT and DALLE-2. For example, I've been very lazy with automating some things on my work laptop, using Powershell. Now, I just had to ask ChatGPT for "write a powershell script that toggles "use setup script" in the windows proxy settings" and I was done in 5 minutes. Amazing. I foresee a paradigm shift in how we use Google in the next 1-2 years.
Sometimes I wonder if all these people that talk on conference stages are nothing more than self-help gurus. All of these words like "productivity", "cleaner code", "maintainable" etc. etc. are like highly optimized words for our dopamine network. They don't add any value to the domain of software engineering. I first realized this when I flipped through Uncle Bob's "highly recommended" Clean Code and almost screamed in horror at the amount of bullshit that book has been able to infect into the industry. Yes, the words sound nice, but look at the code examples. Just look at them.