It's not about "best" or "traditional," though your bias is clearly set.

"Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it.

(It's doubly-ironic for me, as I actually like writing documentation!)

> "Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it.

Ya, no. It’s not that easy. Programming with prompts is much more intellectually challenging, maybe it will be like that in 5-10 years? Right now we are in a productivity increase that is more similar to interactive terminals over using punch cards.

I wonder if the traditionalists simply don’t understand the tech, they seem to have made some whacky unfounded assumptions about it.

I'm assuming you're bucketing me in with the "traditionalists," which is fine.

I didn't say "intellectually challenging." I said "satisfying." Neither matters in the context of enterprise software development, which only cares about "fast" and "safe", but alas.

Regardless, I understand the tech fairly well and have used it, and, no, I haven't found it intellectually challenging _in a way that is satisfying._

In my experience, coding with Claude is basically asking someone else to author what I want and asking it for fixes/changes/etc, kind of like how /u/simonw published here when converting memchr to Python from Rust: https://archive.ph/AqyUq (original Gist here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1bf98596a83ff29b15a2f4790d71c...).

For me (and I'm not alone in feeling this way), that's like asking someone to solve a puzzle for me and guiding them through the steps. Or, more relevantly, asking ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence to type some email or blog post for me when I'm stuck on a word or way to phrase something.

I suppose some find this fun. I don't. The "you should like this" narrative that is constantly being pushed onto me by people who, by and large, have always thought of software development as a means to an end and a cost-optimization exercise is tiring.

This is the point that I keep making and will continue to defend, "traditionalist" or not.

Hmm, I find it just hacking at a different level. It is like when we moved from BASIC to C to Java. I find it definitely satisfying, figuring out how to tell someone to do something is a different skill than actually doing it, though, but it feels right to me.