I can think of few truer identity crises than having a craft you have spent years honing and perfecting automated away.

I fully agree with that statement, but I dont agree with the premise that, that is whats happening currently.

It's the explicitly stated goal of several of the largest companies on the planet which put up a lot of money to try to reach that goal. And the progress over the past few years has been stunning.

It's a pretty good trick if you don't look too hard at the details. Including how many users have been active for a year vs the weekly counts.

That is a very thoughtful piece. Thank you for posting it. I especially like the idea of that new mode of programming (or problem solving, whatever you call it) when people very much enjoy getting an LLM to do what they want.

This is both new and old, because it's the same joy (or dopamine hit) of making a machine do your bidding. Honing your prompts is not that different to honing your shell scripts. I think many people overlook this aspect.

I do a fair bit of "prompt honing" myself, but there remains a fundamental difference between that and traditional hacking of yore: the latter is predictable. The system may be very complex, but you can map it out step by step, and the more you do so the more advanced things you can cajole it into doing - and, importantly, those things don't suddenly stop working "just because".

But with LLMs, your well-honed prompt might be an abject failure on a very similar task that just happens to have enough differences in context that the "magic" in the prompt no longer works. And debugging those kinds of issues basically amounts to throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. And then of course the providers switch models from under you and retire the old ones. So it's not quite the same joy of making a machine do your bidding. In the former case, the joy was from knowing that you can do this now and in the future - that you grok the thing enough to make it do this bidding at any point. With LLMs, it's more like the joy of successfully casting a spell, but you still have no idea why that particular spell worked better than a dozen others, nor can you rely on it working in the future.

I liked your emphasis on individual diversity, and an attendant need to explore, select, adapt, and integrate tooling. With associated self-awareness. Pushing that further, your "categories" seem more like exemplars/prototypes/archetypes/user-stories, helpful discussion points in a high-dimensional space of blended blobs. And as you illustrate, it branches not just on the individual, but also on what they are up to. And not just on work vs hobby, but on context and task.

It'd be neat to have a big user story catalog/map, which tracks what various services are able to help with.

I was a kid in NE43 instead of TFA's Building 26 across the street - with Lisp Machines and 1980s MIT AI's "Programmer's Apprentice" dreams. I years ago gave up on ever having a "this... doesn't suck" dev env, on being able to "dance code". We've had such a badly crippling research and industrial policy, and profession... "not in my lifetime" I thought. Knock on wood, I'm so happy for this chance at being wrong. And also, for "let's just imagine for a moment, ignoring the utterly absurd resources it would take to create, science education content that wasn't a wretched disaster... what might that look like?" - here too it's LLMs, or no chance at all.

That is actually a great idea, and I agree it would be very useful to have such a catalog/map!

I wonder though if the space is mature enough for such a map or if it would become to generic to say anything meaningful.