Assumed audience: People paying attention to and interested in the ongoing “discourse” around LLMs and so-called AI in software engineering.
Coding agents replace the part of my job that involves typing the code into a computer. I find what’s left to be a much more valuable use of my time.
— Simon Willison, commenting on How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents.
This theme seems pervasive lately, and there’s a sense in which I understand and indeed already enact some part of what people mean when they say it. I spend a lot of my time doing things that are not writing code because they are more valuable to my employer than writing code is: mentoring, collaborating with engineering management on organizational design, project lead work including developing plans for further projects, you name it. That’s Staff Engineering in a nutshell.
But I enjoy writing code, and am delighted to get opportunities to be “typing code into the computer”. So many of these people seem to enjoy something else (even if they once enjoyed writing code, too). That’s fine. But it’s definitely different from me.
I also think a lot of these folks pretty deeply underestimate in these kinds of posts the value of typing it in yourself for learning. They’re doing the equivalent of reading a book full of code samples without typing any of them out “by hand”. Anyone who has done that knows that you might learn a bunch that way, but far, far less than you would if you typed them out. (Same as with any other discipline!)