I’m so old that I’m sick and tired of all of them.

There’s 2 answers here. What should devs do to remain effective, and what are devs doing in the industry?

As far as staying relevant - still pretty much the same. If you use a technology, you should understand it. Just because the robot is puking out React code doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand how to write and use React. But you can do more with AI and you don’t need to spend as much time on mundane tasks (like setting up test boilerplate).

There’s a lot of brain rot happening in the industry. Developers are turning into prompt engineers (not a disaster, despite the naysayers), but many are also giving up building an understanding of the code they’re “producing”. That part is dangerous.

If you’re early in your programming career, keep learning things the old fashioned way. AI can help you understand how things work. It’s great if you ask it. Resist just writing a lazy prompt and turning off your brain.

As far as the industry goes… it’s in trouble. The industry is not quite realizing that they way they’re rolling out AI is making junior and intermediate developers redundant. Senior developers can drive an AI to produce things quickly. But they’re all getting old… where are the replacement seniors? It was supposed to be juniors and intermediates that got promoted, but those levels are seeing layoffs or reduced hiring. Something is going to break if this goes on for a few years.

There’s a weird standoff coming where engineers will no longer truly understand the massive systems they built. Instead of knowing stuff, they’ll have to investigate what the hell the AI has written over time. I think the bet leaders are making is that by the time we hit this wall, the AI will be so good at its job that full human understanding is no longer required.

To your question: is it still worth learning? Yes. Always. Even if you interview at the laziest AI software shop, they’re not going to ask if you know how to ask the bot to write a web form. They’re going to ask if you understand what went into your prompts and what the code actually does.

I’m watching everything nervously and skeptically.

We couldn’t draft your letter just now.

I think someone already broke it. Damn. I was looking forward to seeing what it barfed out.

If anyone else is confused about who “Jensen Huang” is, apparently that’s the real name of the guy I always see called Stupid Jacket.

Good riddance, Stupid Jacket. Hope your golden parachute fails to deploy.

I would love to disappear into the wilderness and thrive, like Homer sinking into those bushes.

Don’t follow the tutorial from start to finish. Pay attention (real attention) until you learn enough things to be able to goof around on your own. Then switch over to goofing around.

Stuck? Bored? Is what you learned so far not getting you where you want to go?

Resume the tutorial for a bit. Learn a couple new things. Then goof off with those new things.

Go back and forth.

This is basically how education works. Theory then application, then refinement.

Don’t try to become an expert by sitting through the entire tutorial. That’s boring.

Did you… use all AI generated text and just remove all the capitalization and grammar?! Why?

I don’t think it’s generational in a way that GenZ is any different. This is an age thing.

Most people never need to cook before they’re 18. They just got fed at home. When people first start to move out, things start to shift. Some people get into relationships where the other person cooks. They’re still being provided for.

Others learn a bare minimum of things to cook and do it badly. They do feed themselves but self describe as “can’t cook”.

And some step up and learn the things you need to know to cook that isn’t taught in school.

Time goes by, and more people find themselves in situations where they now need to cook. The population of cooks grows and the non-cooks shrinks.

Whether it’s because of changing interests, financial pressure, divorce, whatever, people need some pressure to develop the skill, and over time they do.

Rules in the sidebar are a good idea. 3-5 is plenty. And I would reserve one as a bit more vague, like “don’t behave like a jerk”.

The rules can evolve over time as you see the points of friction in how users behave. The jerk rule lets you ban assholes without them running screaming to the admins or one of the fediverse drama communities.

The same way they counted all the other ones.

“T as in tsunami”

He looks like they quickly took away his walker to snap the photo.

Die Hard in the Ass

(Words to live by)

There was this business analysis someone wrote about years ago trying to nail down which programming language was the most successful, which they measured by how many business problems it solved.

The winner? Visual fucking Basic.

Because it was so accessible that people in businesses the world over used it to implement simple and sometimes complex solutions to problems without reuquirkng a big dev team and all the complexity that comes with writing “real” software.

I see JS in the same boat. It’s a mess. But it’s so widely deployed (free with a web browser!) and used for so many things that in reality it’s one of the top dogs, even though everyone who knows it well enough to understand its quirks thinks it’s a pile of shit.