When using ChatGPT for some tedious challenges—say, select coding problems and infrastructure setup issues on AWS—I have more than once had the feeling that people weren't built for this kind of work anyway, and that it's exactly the kind for which computers were intended.
It wasn't always this way. Sure, programming has always been an exercise in precision and, thus, sometimes tedium. But, there's something in the way it has changed over the last decade or so. When I first started my career, I spent long hours solving problems of the algorithmic, logic, or control flow type. It was challenging mind work and called for creativity. There was real joy in making something work. It felt like creation.
Now, programming consists largely of wiring together pieces of code that you didn't write, and consulting StackOverflow to figure out why it doesn't work. It's following someone else's decisions in an opinionated framework. It's transpiling and tooling and configuration. And, now that programmers are expected to do much more, it's also using someone else's software for devops and tedious infrastructure buildouts, etc.
I'd say the joy in the software engineering role faded long before the arrival of ChatGPT. I'm actually hopeful that AI will help lighten the load of mundane tedium and help us return to the days when programming was fun.
It wasn't always this way. Sure, programming has always been an exercise in precision and, thus, sometimes tedium. But, there's something in the way it has changed over the last decade or so. When I first started my career, I spent long hours solving problems of the algorithmic, logic, or control flow type. It was challenging mind work and called for creativity. There was real joy in making something work. It felt like creation.
Now, programming consists largely of wiring together pieces of code that you didn't write, and consulting StackOverflow to figure out why it doesn't work. It's following someone else's decisions in an opinionated framework. It's transpiling and tooling and configuration. And, now that programmers are expected to do much more, it's also using someone else's software for devops and tedious infrastructure buildouts, etc.
I'd say the joy in the software engineering role faded long before the arrival of ChatGPT. I'm actually hopeful that AI will help lighten the load of mundane tedium and help us return to the days when programming was fun.