I appreciate those mourning the loss of their programming craft. Maybe the tasks they work on during their day to day is more interesting than mine. But much of what I do professionally, a sizeable majority, is pretty rote: define this interface, put this data in that database, contact this service. And lets not forget the effort that goes into fighting with mocks. I’ve pass the point of morning the loss of manual effort that goes into these. They’re tedious and uninteresting, and I’m more than happy to give that to the LLMs.

No, the coding challenges I find interesting, like language designs; or exercises that stretch me, like designing assets for games; I really only get to do in my spare time. There’s no call for doing this as part of my job: no-ones paying me for a half-baked language that’s useful in only a few domains. This, I keep for myself to work on.

For the code I write professionally, I’m still trying to find the right balance. There’s no real mandate to use agents, and my use of them on production code tends to be governed by the need to deliver something quickly. Time permitting, I do prefer to write the production code myself, and get coding agents to review and update the tests. That understanding that only comes from tactile feedback is real.

That’s not to say that everything I do professionally amounts to coding. It’s pretty much a minority of how I spend my day. Much of it is design, support, investigating things, helping others. Doing these activities, I think, is the bulk of the reason why I’m getting paid. And so far, no agent is capable of automating these jobs away.