And the real maddening part is that search engines have been so enshitfied to make way for AI that’s wrong like 9/10, so you’re forced to rely on it for answers because if you try google, the snake wraps around and eats it’s own tail giving you an AI answer! 
I’m absolutely baffled by it as someone who started their college career in computer science before switching majors. I was never the best programmer, yet it seems so ass-backwards to me modern programmers aren’t writing pseudo-code and working things out on paper. I wasn’t in school that long ago. Did things really change that fast? Are people not doing formal logic anymore? Do they even learn binary and hex? Just what the fuck is happening to this field.
My impression is that the people who are most excited about these tools are people like tech journalists and “solopreneurs” (gag), who have been tech adjacent but never formally learned to code and now think that they don’t need software engineers to achieve their vision anymore.
this. llm code is the silver bullet for “idea guys”
I’m imagining a comedy with this dialog…
“Am I a programmer? A lowly programmer? Of course not! I’m an ideas guy.” As the plot unfolds - it turns out the guy has no idea how to do anything. All he does is enter AI prompts and then lie that he has yet another fantastic idea.
Not a programmer, but as someone whose master’s degree is filled with “write 30 pages worth of documentation before starting a project” when you are actually working in the real world, half that shit goes out of the window. So, I can definitely see how a lot of people are not writing pseudocode and instead brute forcing a bunch of things.
I never went to school for programming but I’ve worked as a dev for almost a decade. I do know binary, hex, and formal logic, but almost never use them. I’ve never written code on paper, but I’ve written informal flow diagrams on a whiteboard and on excalidraw. And my pseudo code is usually just writing out actual code where the method doesn’t exist yet. But I’ve never written pseudo English out to plan what I was doing. I’ve talked about code in pseudo code speak but mostly when other people are piloting on screen share.
I was self-taught programming before I started my college career similarly (also switched majors except I dropped out) and I don’t usually do pseudo-code. I guess I kinda do in my head or write out a plan for how it should work. I also don’t usually do very big projects either. I’ve tried OS dev, but I have a hard time expanding beyond the tutorials on the wiki and keeping things organized and actually working. Mostly now I just write. (switched majors to literary studies)