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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents

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Many jobs have been repetitive and brainless since long before LLMs. I hate AI as much as the next guy, but come on.

Lots of people job wasn’t. Now it is. A lot of people in software went into this field because they actually feel satisfied engaging with systems and their implementations.

Managing a fleet of agent is the exact opposite of what is engaging about software development.

The point is most people's jobs are like that. So it doesn't matter how interesting it was or that who did it before doesn't like it anymore because there's a queue of people lined up to do the brainless new version of the job.

It obviously does matter. The industry was built by people who care about the underlying details and want to engage with the hardware and software at a deep level. That has traditionally been the way people develop expertise - the exact thing you need to effectively use LLMs for anything else than boilerplate work. Ironically agentic stuff pull us away from from that

The point really went over your head. New people don't give a shit how it was done before. Do you care that your clothes aren't hand made?

Why would it not matter? Maybe it doesn't matter to you that you have to spend your life doing brainless miserable work, but a lot of people don't like or want that.

Just because "a lot of people experience x awful thing" doesn't mean "it doesn't matter that programming is now x awful thing because a lot of people experience that". That makes no sense.

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