I don't like Martin Fowler. He is the archetype of the architect astronaut. The OG bullshit meister.

I like LLMs for stuff I don't care about. Programming is not one of them.

Correct. The master BSer is afraid of being replaced by an even better BSer, so doesn’t like it.

Didn’t he invent refactoring? Something that every developer in the world uses every day? Don’t think he’s a bullshitter.

No he did not. For some reason people think he did.

See following article where he talks about the inventors of refactoring: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/EtymologyOfRefactoring.html?u...

What do you mean some reason? He wrote the book Refactoring that caused everyone to start refactoring. That’s quite a big reason. He literally wrote the book on it.

90's high school hobby programmer. I'd rather not use AI for programming if given the chance. For everything else I am pro AI.

This is precisely what the word quote means!

> I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.

This takes all the fun out of programming for me.

I have the same "1/30th ... simultaneous" experience with coding agents, and I am having fun. Directing teams of agents to solve many problems (or create many useful things) for me has its own fun challenges/puzzles-to-solve.

Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.

So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.

I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.

Sure, if that is what you like. I for one did not get into this field because I wanted to hire people (artificial or natural) to write the programs for me. Programming as an activity / art is what I enjoyed the most. Managing people / agents is a total turn off.

serious question: do you program in machine code or assembler or use a higher level language? do you use design patterns and functional approaches? metaprogramming, code generation, templating, app frameworks?

Each tool, abstraction, language feature elevates coding to get more done with less (more concisely). Programming is a social activity, since source code is meant to be read by humans (at least historically) even if it is just yourself later.

I'm not trying to talk you into using AI coding agents, but explain why I find them fun, and I've written a lot of code by hand over decades, from spaghetti assembler code to structureed programming to object oriented to functional, etc. Each advance in the industry has been a new and diiferent kind of fun for me.

> serious question: do you program in machine code or assembler

Sometimes yes.

> or use a higher level language? do you use design patterns and functional approaches? metaprogramming, code generation, templating, app frameworks?

Most of the time.

> Each tool, abstraction, language feature elevates coding to get more done with less (more concisely)

Sure. I hope you understand AI is fundamentally different. It's nothing like the things you listed above.

Are you saying that AI coding agents cannot produce working code? Or are you saying that it produces something that cannot be explained or understood?

If I used a macro to generate code that gets compiled and linked to code someone else provided, how is that different from asking a coding agent to generate similar code and linking to other coding agent code?

Is your concern that the output is probabilistic vs. a macro or code generator producing code deterministically? I apply engineering practices to ensure the results are suitable.

I do understand that AI is fundamentally different (and I've been studying ML in depth for more than a year). My comparison was in terms of tools increasing productivity, not how they do that.

I was a "10x programmer" on several projects and I am 10x more productive now than I was then (at least). I can create in a few days by myself (with agents) what used to take months (with a team of people).

Maybe I'm producing what some consider "AI slop" but the things I've built this year work to my satisfaction, are fun to make, and I am constantly learning new things. And I am doing this for fun but also to learn by teaching, so I build educational, visual things to share with others.

Nobody's stopping you from writing code, whether as a hobby or you find/start a company where that's valued.

But I am creating programs to manage the coding agents for me. Of course I am using coding agents to do that. It's turtles all the way down :-)

Some say this war was started to distract from the Epstein files issue.

Most laypeople I know haven't seen an ad blocker in action ever.

Is there a name for the phenomenon in which you look at something and know that there is something wrong with it but struggle to identify the problem?

I got this feeling looking at the (non)word cantine.

Wiktionary lists cantine as an archaic form of canteen, also the french word that canteen came from is also spelled cantine.

How do you run this thing? What kind of hardware do you need?

Isn't this like the P vs NP problems? Once you have a solution it is easy to verify?

Strangely, I knew this one. Once you hear this word it refuses to leave your head.