The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer
hojberg.xyz
On AI, Creativity, and Craft

The ghosts of ancient Hackers past still roam the machines and—through the culture they established—our minds. Their legacy of the forging of craft lingers. A deep and kinetic craft we’ve extended and built a passionate industry on. We are driven by the same wonder, sense of achievement, and elegance of puzzle-solving as they were. Still driven by “The Right Thing.” These constitutional ideas, the very identity of programmers, are increasingly imperiled. Under threat. The future of programming, once so bright and apparent, is now cloaked in foreboding darkness, grifts, and uncertainty.

  • Jayjader@jlai.lu
    11·
    22 hours ago

    I relate to this article. On the bright(er) side, I looked at the latest release notes for Cursor; they’re still adding in features that I:

    1. Would call basic
    2. Felt the need for after spending just a few days writing my own cli chat/agent (talking to/with a local model run using ollama)

    Similarity, I watched some of a recent week-long “vibe-coding game dev stream” (read: Cursor + Omarchy product placement/sponsored ad). Two cursor employees were present for around half a day to basically do some on-the-ground reconnaissance (read: talk to some actual users and get concrete feedback). I was astonished at how they seemed to discover in real time some of the sharp edges and missing functionality in their own product. Do they not use Cursor (or any of their competitors) to develop Cursor? Even if neither employee was a dev, surely they hear from their coworkers and their customers on a regular basis!

    So, if these LLM-based agents are supposed to replace us, why are their makers so slow at building them out? Have all the “skilled” and/or experienced developers decided to shun working for them? Have they assumed up till now that most of their users would not be using them to develop software?

    I know how hard it is to produce good estimations in software development. It just doesn’t seem like the companies working on them actually understand what the grunt, moment-to-moment work of software development consists of.

    If that’s true, then programmers like this article’s author should be fine if they can weather the current LLM craze.