Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…I mean, we’re definitely going in that direction. Programming is just a part of building products. So maybe, maybe AI does replace programmers eventually. But there’s so much more to that art. Like, what do you actually wanna build? How should it feel? How’s the architecture? I don’t think agents will replace all of that. Yeah, like, just the, the actual art of programming, it will, it will stay there, but it’s, it’s gonna be like knitting. You know? Like, people do that because they like it, not because it makes any sense. So the… I read this article this morning about someone that it’s okay to mourn our craft. And I can… A part of me very strongly resonates with that because in my past I, I spent a lot of time tinkering, just being really deep in the flow and just, like, cranking out code and, like, finding really beautiful solutions. And yes, in a way it’s, it’s sad because that will go away. And I also get a lot of joy out of just writing code and being really deep in my thoughts and forgetting time and space and just being in this beautiful state of flow. But you can get the same state of flow… I get a similar state of flow by working with agents and building and thinking really hard about problems. It is different-… but… And it’s okay to mourn it, but I mean, that’s not something we can fight. Like, there is… the world for a long time had a… there was a lack of intelligence, if you s- if you see it like that, of people building things, and that’s why salaries of software developers reached stupidly high amounts and then will go away. There will still be a lot of demand for people that understand how to build things. It’s just that all this tokenized intelligence enables people to do a lot more, a lot faster. And it will be even more… even faster and even more because those things are continuously improving. We had similar things when… I mean, it’s probably not a perfect analogy, but when we created the steam engine, and they built all these factories and replaced a lot of manual labor, and then people revolted and broke the machines. Um, I- I can relate that if you very deeply identify that you are a programmer, that it’s scary and that it’s threatening because what you like and what you’re really good at is now being done by a soulless or not entity. But I don’t think you’re just a programmer. That’s a very limiting view of your craft. You are, you are still a builder. Yeah, there’s a couple of things I want to say. So one is, I never… As you’re articulating this beautifully, I no- I’m realizing I never thought I would… the thing I love doing would be the thing that gets replaced. You hear these stories about these, like you said, with the steam engine. I’ve, I’ve spent so many, I don’t know, maybe thousands of hours poring over code and putting my heart and soul and, like, and just, like, some of my most painful and happiest moments were alone behind… I, I was an Emacs person for a long time. Man, Emacs. And, and then there’s an identity and there’s meaning, and there’s… Like, when I walk about the world, I don’t say it out loud, but I think of myself as a programmer. And to have that in a matter of months… I mean, like you mentioned, April to November, it really is a leap that happened, a shift that’s happening. To have that completely replaced is is painful. It’s, it’s truly painful. But I also think programmers, builders more broadly, but what is, what is the act of programming? I, I think programmers are generally best equipped at this moment in history to learn the language, to empathize with agents, to learn the language of agents. To feel the CLI. Yeah.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.