Future of programming

`1:33:14`

This is what's crucial to understand programming for programmers who like to code is not just about the programs they get out of it. That may be the economic value. It's not the only human value. The human value is just much in the expression. When someone who sits down on a guitar and plays "Stairway to Heaven," there's a perfect recording of that that will last in eternity. You can just put it on Spotify. You don't actually need to do it. The joy is to command the guitar yourself. The joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. If I elevate myself, if I promote myself out of programming, I turn myself into a project manager. A project manager of a murder of AI crows as I wrote the other day. I could have been become a project manager my whole career. I could have become a project manager 20 years ago if I didn't care to write code myself. And I just wanted outcomes. That's how I got started in programming. I just wanted outcomes. Then I fell in love with programming

`1:34:16`

and now I'd rather retire than giving it up. Now that doesn't mean you can't have your cake and needed to. I've done some vibe coding where I didn't care that I wasn't playing myself. I just wanted to see something. There was an idea in my head. I wanted to see something. That's fine. I also use AI all day long. In fact, I'm already at the point where if you took it away from me, I'd be like, oh my god, how do we even look things up on the internet anymore? Is Stack Overflow still around? Or I'm still a thing? Like how do I even find answers to some of these questions I have all day long. I don't wanna give up AI. In fact, I'd say the way I like to use AI, I'm getting smarter every because of AI. Because I'm using AI to have it explain things to me. Even stupid questions. I would be a little embarrassed to even enter into Google. AI is perfectly willing to give me the ELI5 explanation of some Unix command. I should have known already, but I don't, I'm sorry,

`1:35:17`

can you just explain it to me and now I know the thing. So at the end of the day of me working with AI all day long, I'm a little bit smarter. Like 5%, sorry, not 5%, half a percent maybe. That compounds over time. But what I've also seen, when I worked on the Omakub project and I tried to let AI drive for me, I felt I was maybe half a percent dumber at the end of the day. — Okay, you said a lot of interesting things. First of all, let's just start at the very fact that asking dumb questions. If you go to Stack Overflow and ask a dumb question or read somebody else's dumb question and the answer to it, there's a lot of judgment there. AI sometimes to an excessive degree has no judgment. It usually says, oh, that's a great question. — [DHH] To a fault. — Yeah, oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, I mean, it's so conducive to learning. It's such a wonderful tool of learning and I too would miss it. And it's a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances

`1:36:18`

of a particular programming language, especially if you don't know it that well or like APIs you can load in documentation. It's just so great for learning. I, for me personally... I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. I don't know what that is exactly. Part of that is the, I'm really sorry. Stack Overflow is an incredible website, but there is a negativity there. There's a judgment there. It's just exciting to be out like with a hype man next to me, just like saying, yeah, that's a great idea. And I'll say, no, that's wrong. I'll correct the AI, and the AI will say, "You're absolutely right. How did I not think about that?" You know, rewrite the code. I'm like, holy shit, I'm having, that's like a buddy. That's like really being positive and is very smart and is challenging me to think. And even if I never use the code it generates, I'm already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is for some reason

`1:37:20`

I'm having more fun. That's a really, really important thing. — I like to think of it as a pair programmer for exactly that reason. Pair programming came a vogue in like the 2000s. Where you'd have two programmers in front of one machine and you'd push the keyboard between you. One programmer would be driving, they'd be typing in. The other programmer would essentially sit and watch the code, suggest improvements, look something up. That was a really interesting dynamic. Now unfortunately, I'm an introvert, so I can do that for about five minutes before I want to jump off a bridge. So it doesn't work for me as a full-time occupation. But AI allows me to have all the best of that experience all the time. Now I think what's really interesting, what you said about it makes it more fun. I hadn't actually thought about that, but what it's made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time. Now I had to do the detour where I let it write all the code for me and I realized I wasn't learning nearly as much as I hoped I would