The quote below is from Andrej Karpathy.

Funny thing - I feel the complete opposite.

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"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind."

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Discussion

Volume has become an even more useless proxy for programmer skill. This is only a short term problem as the cream will rise to the top like never before.

I remember when programmers were measured by the ‘kloc’ - kilolines of code.

I feel like I am catching up. All the compartmentalization in engineering departments meant you never got to see how all the sausage was made. Now as a one man shop for the most part, I have to do everything. AI is literally teaching me all the thing that were obfuscated from me over the years.

Me too, catching up and surpassing.

I don’t need to spend any energy convincing anyone to renounce their old way. Permissionless building with #nostr and combined with #ai is a superpower.