The State of Developers
Recently, I read an article, Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human, via a Hacker News thread and that got me thinking, “Why do so many developers just wait to be spoon-fed what code to write?”
Development/Programming involves three distinct “time buckets”:
- Why am I doing this? Understanding the business problem and value.
- What do I need to do? Designing the solution conceptually.
- How am I going to do it? Actually writing the code.
A lot of developers are stuck focussing on that last action—coding. They expect to be spoon-fed the first two:
- the business people will write the product requirement, and
- a senior architect will layout templates so they can fill in the blanks with codes.
And one of the comments in the discussion thread hit it straight;
The third one is, in fact, one of the easiest. Suppose a developer spends an inordinate amount of time there. That usually means the first two were not done well, or you’re unfamiliar with the tooling (language, library, IDE, test runner, etc.).
Manual code editing involves some drudgery (renaming variables, extracting functions, etc.), but many languages already solve these problems with IDEs and indexers that automate them. Almost all editors support programmable snippets, and configuring the editor solves many of the roadblocks when writing code.
If a developer is not involved in the first two of understanding why they are doing it and how to walk through the maze even before writing the code, they are just Coders, not Programmers.
With the advancement of coding assistance with AI, these coders are becoming disposable bricklayers in the world of product development.