You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion.
This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature into existence, checked the tests, and took enough time to ensure that it was good. You didn't lie about your contribution in the PR, and the maintainer deemed it acceptable. And now everyone has this feature!
When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?
As a woodworker who owns both hand tools and power tools, I don't feel bad when I spend most of a project cutting the repetitive pieces with a motorized saw. I also don't feel like a snob because I prefer certain hand saws under certain circumstances.
To me, the metaphor is pretty solid for coding LLMs. A motorized saw, to anyone that's used them, takes away all the pain and complexity of using a hand saw for the same work, but it also introduces its own complexity and pain. There's also things that stay consistent: I still find myself transferring or measuring certain ways, I still have to brace the piece, I still need jigs (albeit different ones).
No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything or experienced anything at all.
That's what LLM coding feels like--like I'm not doing anything meaningful. It's like hiring someone to love my kid for me.
That's a poor analogy.
If I asked an intern to implement a function, I know I did the instruction and that I worked through them. The intern did work, but I did fancy high level work and killed several birds with one stone.
Even better analogy: if I'm a film director, I'm working through a lot of people. The DP, the cast, the crew, the AD (though they're my boss, telling me what I can/can't budget for)...
The best analogy for AI is the "film director" analogy.
There are good directors and bad directors, good films and bad films. No director works alone (unless it's some kind of avant-garde film school project).
You wouldn't say a film director isn't doing work. That they can't be uniquely felt through their work. That what they're doing isn't hard, doesn't require talent/taste, and doesn't get better over time.
We're all basically becoming film directors.
And I totally did feel less good about BLTs I made with supermarket heirloom tomatoes!
It was irrational, but I did feel that way. I get where people are coming from.
Cherokee Purple. Black Krim Black from Tula. Brandywine heck, Almost any black tomato is a richer flavor than traditional hybrids.
Heirloom tomatoes are also fantastic for flavors, but they are difficult to grow. Consistent watering, pruning lower leaves to keep disease away, proactive treatment of fungus and bacteria. It's a lot of work, but the results you get when it all comes together, yeah, it makes a fantastic tomato soup, sauce, Caprese salad.
I'm starting seedlings this week. I'm probably going to have more tomato seedlings than I know what to do with. Of course, as problems go, I could have worse ones. The problem I'd like to have is growing too many mini watermelons. For some reason, I just can't get any yield, and the squirrels/mice gnaw on them as soon as they are vaguely ripe.
My partner is not going to be happy when I rip up most of the lawn in the backyard. She'll probably buy me overalls and a straw hat.
"*A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon.*
It wasn't until I tasted my first great tomato, at the vine-ripe old age of 22, that I finally understood the true nature of the BLT (and, by extension, why I'd never enjoyed tomatoes on my sandwiches or in my salads). Here we go: A BLT is not a well-dressed bacon sandwich. A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon. From this basic premise, all else follows."
https://www.seriouseats.com/ultimate-blt-sandwich-bacon-lett...
I don’t think this is the right question. What you posit is a consumption dilemma. It’s a valid question, but it focuses on what values we might arbitrarily ascribe to how we source what we consume.
The OPs dilemma is more akin to giving a cutting board for Christmas that you bought vs handmade. Or some other. I think these cases of how we present what it appears we created is the dilemma OP is facing.
IMO, the way we talk about using AI leads to a lot of confusion and needs to change.
if you cant lift something because its heavy, but have an exo suit that will let you lift it... does that make you feel like a fraud?
AI is like that its a tool. you;re still responsible for the use of it and the output of it. you need to understand that if you use that exo suit to hurt someone or use it poorly and damage something/someone.. thats entirely on you. just like a knife in your hand is a tool to prep food or to attack someone. your actions with it are on you.
Anyways, you ever seen the average excavator pilot? They're often very physically unhealthy
I predict the average LLM pilot will be similarly mentally unhealthy
spend all day talking to people (except it's LLMs) and not sure if you accomplished anything, but people seem happy
The plus side is for your personal things like this you don't have to use it of course!
I have no idea what they code and how they code it. I only go over the specs with them. Everything got quicker but the quality went down. I had to step in and we now have e2e-Test for everything. Maybe it's too much, but bugs got squashed and catched before we shipped.
So that's a win. Before I could test everything by hand. I worked more on things like creating a working release cycle and what tools we should use.
With or without AI the situation would have been similar.
I became a manager. We move the needle. I don't really get to code anymore and I don't see much of the code. It's strange.
Author says he does enjoy managing people, challenging them, and seeing them grow and accomplish things they couldn’t before.
None of that accompanies “managing” an LLM.
We had 8 people on that team. The entire scope of what we did for a living was replaced, mostly by 2010 or so. My role was made redundant by improving storage performance and capacity. We had a few TB and lots of blob data. I cared about where data was stored from a disk geometry perspective. Today, I could smoke that infrastructure with my MacBook.
The other DBA roles also mostly moved on. ORMs automated a lot of schema work. Engine optimizations eliminated a lot of the operational tuning work that went on. Most of the other stuff moved into adjacent developer roles.
Most places have very few DBAs today. That startup today would have had zero.
I think the author is being way too hard on himself. He defined a problem, worked with the computer to “scratch the itch” presumably QA’d the result and sent it upstream. That’s valid and useful. The method is different. But the work is solving the problems - and just like crazy kids solved problems with VisualBasic and the real men wielding C++ shook their heads, the AI tools are going to produce alot of shit, but also solve alot of problems.
AI tools remove drudgery at an unprecedented rate. My favorite new way of creating new projects is 1) create empty directory. 2) point codex at it and give it some example git repos (on disk or by url) and tell it use that repo as a template, copy some features/skills from that repo over there, and then build me an X.
That completely wipes out the drudgery of setting up a new project, fiddling with whatever to get it just right and doing a bunch of work to get some basic mvp in place. You kind of hit the ground running 5 minutes into this. Same with debugging. "CI failed, check what happened and fix it". Or "Follow the release skill and cut a new release". I have a skill dialed in to do a lot of checks around that; it also follows CI to ensure things go ahead as planned. All stuff I used to do manually.
At the very least the change has made me reduce the amount of time I spend here. But I'm still a bit bummed about it.
I built a TV OS slideshow app for both photos and videos (as far as I know all the apps just go through photos).
I have no experience in Apple OSes development and in the past it would had taken me at least a week to just read enough documentation to get started.
Now? It took me 3 hours of iterating with an LLM to start from scratch developing and publish the app.
AI will click as another tool in the toolbox.
There are uses for both, but job/compensation wise the heirloom grower isn't in the majority.
The quality of a contribution is not a function of how much you learned or grew while you made it. Learning and growth are part of your compensation for making the contribution. The author is not a fraud for not learning anything. If anything, it seems like they should feel short-changed!
When voluntarily making contributions to open-source projects, everyone should of course feel free not to use AI tools if they want. However, I would argue that using AI tools is a valuable skill itself, and worth practicing.
As long as you understand it before committing, you own your version of it now. There's no way in hell I'd waste time playing the slot machine. I am perfectly capable of writing the exact missing parts I need to integrate and move on quickly. How is this any different from SO copypasta a decade ago? Just like that wasn't always the right tool for the job, neither is "AI".
This sounds like a completely different problem than AI usage itself. My time is most valuable making decisions for the project. Yes, the vast majority of those decisions involve the code for the implementation details, but I just need clean simple code that does the job and that anyone or anything can easily change later. The AI doesn't always give that to me, and sometimes neither do other humans. That's why I'm employed. That's what it really means to be a maintainer and contribute.
But now post LLM coding agents, its not at all that. Nothing about programming for money resembles artisanship.
It might be time to try sewing wallets or something...
They absolutely do care how software is built. They just don't weight the factors the same way you do.
Product companies exist to convert software into money by providing utility to users. There's really no part of the transaction that meaningfully involves how much fun you're personally having building it.
Funny. Steve Jobs was all about fun. Seems to have worked out well given Apple has maintained much of the culture Steve left behind.
By every account I’ve seen, Steve Jobs cared that the users of the product were having fun. He did not care at all how much fun the people building the product had.
> This PR adds support for embedded Ruby (ERB) which is commonly used in Ruby on Rails projects. Note that I used heavy assistance from Claude Code and tried to ensure it didn't generate slop to the best of my abilities. All tests are passing and I also visually verified the end result which looks solid to me.
> Here's a screenshot that was generated by building the Chroma CLI with the ERB lexer and running it against the test data file with chroma --lexer=erb --style=monokai --html lexers/testdata/erb.actual
Well I’m sorry you feel that way, impostor syndrome is tough to deal with already without AI.
You seem to be driven by understanding and you have a great tool to learn from here if you make an effort over time to grasp the “slop” you’re throwing to the wall. Be curious, ask why several times and explore guilt free over time when you are in the right mindset.
I’m glad you got something useful out of it this time and also not everything you do with AI has to be useful or a final “deliverable”, it can also be a great toy and window into more understanding.
you will get a proper sense of ownership and of at least having put some work into not delivering slop, though of course there might still be subtle issues that only the people familiar with the codebase would catch.
> I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall
> my impostor syndrome got worse
> thanks for dealing with my slop, Alec
> I have never felt like a bigger fraud in this field
I'm the most senior software developer in my company and I sit in the middle of the room with my screens open to everyone, and I use 10x the average tokens. I've felt like an imposter when I was barely measuring up against the intellectual giants in my first jobs. It's a feeling, and it has nothing to do with you, your work, or your automation tools.
Secrecy leads to bad patterns of practice. AI doesn't make good programmers bad, or bad programmers good.
Addressing the lack of fun:
> I’m privileged that I get to have fun at all in my line of work
> this has sucked out all of the fun
Split your coding in two: The part that gets done quick, and the part where you personally care about every line of code.
This was always a problem with commercial programming for me: Employer only cares that it gets done, I care that it's good. The tension is necessary.
There are aspects to your style of craftsmanship that the AI hasn't encoded yet.
I choose to embed those in templates and agent skills, but you can also just keep writing that code yourself.
Addressing productivity:
> I would not have the mental capacity or skill to create a pull request like that without AI tooling
> Now that using AI is a normal expectation at work and how I’m evaluated in performance reviews, I suspect that this fraud feeling will only grow
I think that's why using it is so unavoidable: It does increase productivity and lowers cognitive strain, at the cost of yolo.
I don't know if "fraud feeling" is referring to your impostor syndrome, and you want to get rid of this: deal with the feeling, it's just part of your growth as a person. Or if you're using fraud as a loaded term to devalue AI use in programming for ideological reasons: Can't help here, I don't have a problem with it.
Addressing craftsmanship:
> no matter how big the impact, I feel empty
> I still contributed something of value
> I perhaps tied my identity too much to my career
> I’m not the greatest engineer, but I’ve always worked hard
> I care about the craftsmanship of my code
Your interest in the details of your craft will disappear eventually.
Keep it up as long as you care, it's fun.
When you're ready to see yourself as something else, it will naturally fade.
I've been an aspiring team lead without a team for a long time. Now I have a team of robots (and incidentally a team of people), and it feels natural. I still code in my spare time, but not for productivity, only when I have to or when I want to have fun.
For me, I've slowly switched to wanting things to exist rather than wanting to make them. That helps swallowing that I don't code as much any more. (I mean, I still recreatively code 2-3 hours per day, but it's far from the 8-16 hours that have been the norm in my life.)
If it helps: It is probably good for your physical well-being that you don't have to sit hunched over as much.
Use AI-assisted coding to MVP or vertical slice or however you want to call it. Prove that it works and is doable. Now you have baseline to start editing from, rewrite every single line, even the ones with just a single { if that's how you roll.
Or read it and ship it as is. Maybe adjust the agent's instructions and the project linters/formatters to match your specific style better.
