I got into this field because I love to create - hand to keyboard, write some code, see a result. It’s such a wonderful feeling to make things come alive with the skills you’ve honed.
LLMs are undoubtedly making it so we can output code faster (whether it’s “more efficient” is another story, and I don’t quite have an opinion on that yet), but I really miss feeling of when I actually created something. Yeah, I can point to a site where I generated half of it or more via an LLM and say “I made that”, but…I don’t think I truly believe it.
I believe that the real creatives among developers are going to get burnt out with using LLMs. The satisfaction of labouring over a complex animation, a tight, mobile responsive layout, or a sophisticated backend that handles all of the edge cases is, I feel, impossible to capture while using an LLM. I just write a few prompts, and then it’s done for me.
It’s like the master carpenter that starts his own business, and is now just advising his employees on how to build furniture. Maybe he enjoys the management side of things, maybe not, but one thing is for sure: if he is passionate about his craft, he misses the feeling of having his favourite tool by his side, and building something with his own 2 hands.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think LLMs are definitely positive in many ways - especially as a “rubber ducking” partner. I’ve caught edge cases I never would have thought of (or didn’t even know existed) while chatting through an implementation with an LLM. Esoteric accessibility issues, hard-to-spot TOCTOU race conditions, you name it. I am just feeling a little worn down by it all. I think there are some devs that absolutely love that part of the job, and they are the ones that will thrive on this new era of prompt to code, rinse and repeat, with focusing their dev expertise on the architecture.
I’m a musician, and it feels kind of similar with using a tool like Suno. When I first found out about Suno, I was very impressed, and it seemed really cool! I could just prompt, or throw in a track that I did that was half-baked, and it magically produced this highly-polished, radio-ready track. But after messing around with it for a while, it just felt kind of…hollow. Throwing a text prompt at an AI is something pretty much anyone can do, and if anyone can do it, what makes my work special? Is there any really of “me” in it if I had barely any influence on the final outcome?
I don’t really know where to go from here, but I do know that becoming a developer is definitely something I’ll be hesitant to recommend as a career path to the young people I know that have highly creative ambitions. I’m worried about the future of creativity as a whole, but that’s for another post. For now, I will get back to work, and see if I can’t spark a little bit of the joy that I’ve been missing over the last few months.