For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job.
Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t manage to write code for a week, I’d start to notice it.
Now it’s context switching all day I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. After working full-time like this for ~8 months, one thing I’m sure of is that this way of working involves much less time spent in a flow state.
So do we retroactively get the title…? how does this work? 😎
That said, it is an incredible tool. Moral equivalent of an excavator or fork lift or something. It it is most effectively used as such to schlep great quantities of tedium around(implement this lugubrious API, reorganize this class hierarchy, swap out this abstraction/pattern). Things that before used to be hobby project killers to my ADHD brain are no longer the limiting factor.
You just have to be careful with how it rewrites things.
Also, even the best LLMs seem to trip on tiny details in code now and then. Like a directory mixup or maybe the name of a very specific built-in function.
Sometimes it might find the issue, sometimes it will rewrite everything again trying to find it.
Being an actual programmer means a lot in those situations.
Happened to me maybe 1/5 times I asked it to generate things. Last time was maybe a week ago it fabricated a file location and then tried to rewrite core functions to get around it, rather than actually find it, but I haven’t been messing with it much this week.