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\[unintelligible 01:02:53.00\] made me realize that \*bleep\*, maybe a lot of this hand-wringing is just like old man wondering about the clouds, you know? Like, is this still true programming? It turns out younger people don't care, you know? And it felt like somebody in 1965 "Oh, the electric guitar - is this real mu... |
And yeah, like you said, it's a generational thing. And if you're the young generation... I mean, go to any 20-year-old at university right now studying computer science, or programming in their spare time... I will guarantee you they use AI, and they don't bat an eye about it. Like, they don't worry about "Is this tru... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Here's something visual for those tuning in via video and they can see me. What am I doing here? What is this? |
**Jerod Santo:** You're calling somebody. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Taking a phone call. What is this? Or maybe this, since it's like a real object. This is taking a phone call, to folks these days. This is not. And so there's a generational divide. It's like, that is not the way the phone operates anymore. The phone has moved to this other thing, that is not connec... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, I 100% agree. |
**Jerod Santo:** It hurts if you have a Vim tattoo though, you know? \[laughs\] I mean, I kid, but there is an identification factor which is actually baggage to change, is that identification. Just like we identify perhaps with the music of our youth or our formative years and not the current music. There's an aspect ... |
\[01:06:19.24\] Now, there's also rational skepticism, that I think comes from being around enough to see a lot of fads come and go. And I think if it weren't for my particular perspective through this podcast, I would have written these things off pretty early myself... And you could probably go back, if you had copio... |
And then the other one is the -- you went to the bell curve, and that... I think they call that the midwit theme, or midwit meme, where like the one in the middle thinks they're like the smartest and has the worst take. It's like the junior gets it for a different reason, the senior gets it, and the middle ones don't g... |
And if you look at that bell curve - well, the junior doesn't really have any skills, so they don't care. They're like "Cool, this helps me do stuff I couldn't do." And the senior, I think, if they are continually curious and self-aware, they realize that the skills are a means to an end, and really what they're about ... |
But when you're at the peak of that bell curve, you've spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort maximizing your engineering skills... And so it's the hardest for you to say "These skills aren't actually all that useful anymore, all that valuable." And I think that, for a lot of us, just hurts. |
**Thorsten Ball:** I think there's a lot of identity wrapped up in this. Like you said, people identify with "I'm the guy who never has to look up a method in Rust. I'm the guy who knows all of the syntax. I'm the guy who's really good at Vim." And to use that example again that you brought up with the senior engineer.... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. There's so much more to it. Like, it matters, but there's so many other things... |
**Thorsten Ball:** It matters, but you realize that code might be a liability even, and whatnot. And that same curve, I think you can go through over time when it comes to tools, where you're like "Well--" I mean, I had this experience early on. I was pretty good and fast in Vim, super-proud of it, and I thought "Every... |
\[01:10:02.27\] And then I had a senior colleague and he used Sublime, and I don't think the guy has ever configured any keyboard shortcut ever in his life, and he was still incredibly fast... And he did a lot of amazing stuff, and made a lot of smart decisions, and he was a senior engineer for a reason... And I realiz... |
And I think there's a lot of this going on, where right now people are running around with AI as the sledgehammer to hit people over the head and say "This is over. What you've put a lot of effort in is not worth a lot anymore." And to some extent that's true, to some extent that's harsh, and you have to empathize with... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I think what we have to recognize in order to accept that harsh reality, but also overcome it and really leverage it is that it's not that our skills are useless, it's that they've lost value. But because of where we've been as engineers, we are well positioned to leverage the new tools better th... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. There was this amazing Kent Beck quote that popped up, I think yesterday or a couple of days ago, in the Pragmatic Engineering Newsletter. And I think Kent Beck said this even two years ago about ChatGPT... And I'm getting the numbers wrong, but I think he was saying that "Oh, I just realized t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. Yeah, he drills it. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. And it's this - a lot of the mechanical stuff, like "Which framework do you configure, how, and what goes into which config file, and how do you type this, and how do you do that? How do you construct an FFmpeg command? What command line arguments?", all of that stuff... Pretty worthless right ... |
**Jerod Santo:** 100%. Analog to this, I just told this to my kids this morning, because of course, as parents and teachers, we're trying to figure out how to approach these new things as well... There's a lot of upheaval in school systems right now. I mean, it's a mess out there. There's a lot of cheating that's just ... |
\[01:14:27.26\] And so use these things that help us build way better than we could before, versus just building for us and just being along for the ride. Even though it does feel like a ride along the way, which is kind of why it's fun, right? You're like "Wow, it's just happening." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I mean, \[unintelligible 01:14:42.22\] I was just arguing back really just to this idea -- maybe to the Vim folks who have the tattoo, and all that... |
**Jerod Santo:** You're just picking on the Vim folks... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like, you can still SSH into a machine today. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not common to do it. You usually you use a CLI to do it, and at some point you'll have an agent use a CLI to do it. Or maybe today you should be doing that. But SSH still exists. You still have a username and login, and you can still control how you access a Linux machine. It's just not common.... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I think what you're saying also touches on something else, which is that in these discussions a lot of stuff gets thrown into one bucket, that is programming. Will AI be able to replace programmers? And I think people need to understand there's a thousand different types of programmers out there. The... |
And I think when we say it's gonna change a lot of programming, and then people push back with "Oh, it cannot modify the storage layer of Postgres", and it's like, "That's not what I mean." But what I mean is that every day, 10,000 of times, somebody gets a phone call to call somebody else to say "Can you change this o... |
\[01:18:09.05\] And to come back to your point of SSH into a machine - when the cloud got big, a lot of people were saying "Oh, the cloud is just another computer. It's not different. We will always have sysadmins. We will always have sysadmins that administrate those machines." And yes, we do have sysadmins still. In ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, they just graduated in different areas. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Exactly. And if you look at the number of job postings that hire for sysadmins, I'm pretty sure that's changed in the last 15 years. And I think some of those changes will happen to programming. I don't think you will find the same amount of -- in Germany it's called a web designer, or frontend devel... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, if you're working on like really edge, fringe, R&D, those are areas that are more protected. I would say if you're in the 80% realm, where 80% of the development is done by a common, hireable, typical developer these days - that job is probably more in jeopardy of either getting compressed, or... |
It's such a wild thing to think about how this is changing, though. Even in the moment - this podcast is for software developers, okay? Just in case you didn't know that, listener... |
**Jerod Santo:** And agents... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're a human. This is not a podcast for robots... Yet. |
**Jerod Santo:** Jinx. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So... That's a profound thing to even think about, too. I've been thinking too about the kind of code you're writing. Have you been amping with Amp? Can you kind of give us maybe a more clear picture of the behind the scenes? Because I asked you for that and you kind of alluded to it, and you basica... |
**Thorsten Ball:** Well, I guess my title is still software engineer, and I wrote this other blog post about how I use Amp that's also on ampcode.com, that kind of goes into this... And I think the bigger picture idea is that -- I call it paint by numbers programming. So that means my job as a senior engineer is to thi... |
\[01:22:08.03\] And on a practical level, I think 50% - or more; say 60%, 70% - of the code in our codebase, which is standard TypeScript, Svelte, SvelteKit, a standard-looking codebase, a lot of that is generated. And a lot of the, say, load-bearing parts, the stakes in the ground parts, where you say "This is the arc... |
What I previously would have done is create the storybook page, create one version of this, create some mock data, do some Vim stuff, duplicate the mock data in like different states and different configurations, and then render it, or put in other terms. You have a test suite, and you have some mock data, like "Five d... |
And one other thing that people kept saying is that I didn't realize how much dumb typing I did while programming. We've all heard this, "Oh, thinking is the bottleneck. Typing speed doesn't matter." But then you're doing it and it's like "Okay, yeah, fix the import statement. No, add that missing import. No, no, no, a... |
I'll give you a concrete example from two hours ago. I have two components in the UI, and they should do the same thing. One of them has two buttons, and the other one has one of two buttons. And I'm like "Why are they inconsistent?" They both should have these -- let's call them sign in and sign out buttons. One only ... |
\[01:25:55.17\] So I say "Agent, this component has one button, this component has two buttons. The first one should also have two buttons. Please make it happen." And it looks at both components, it figures it out... It's not a hard task. It copies it over, and 20 seconds later it's done. And I didn't have to type thi... |
And that obviously goes -- that's one of the smallest examples. And what I did earlier today was I built -- I wanted to have some... I don't know, let's call it a testing script, where I have like a bunch of data, and I wanna go through the data, and for each piece of data I wanna run it, send it against the API and se... |
**Jerod Santo:** Ad hoc, yeah. It's like a tool-specific -- |
**Thorsten Ball:** A shim? Is it a shim? I don't know. But basically -- I'll give you a really concrete example, another one, from a few months ago. This was early days of Amp... And yes, for everybody listening, this is not in production. This was early, early days. But just -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Like two months ago... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it was forever ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This was two months ago... Early days. \[laughs\] |
**Thorsten Ball:** So we had the agent fail sometimes, to edit a file. So users would say -- early alpha testers, okay? They would say "It sometimes fails. And then I would go "That doesn't help me. I need the data. Like, what was the input? What was the actual file on disk? What's the thing that happened?" And in orde... |
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