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In the following words and sentences, many people will recognize themselves.
When I started to code and work more than two decades ago, it was different than it is now. You needed to know exactly what every byte of code was doing, how it would affect your code and consequently, your goal → task. I was writing firmware for small processors like the Atmega family, where you needed to squeeze the code into just 2K - can you imagine that :).
BIT story
I still remember a few of my daily struggles from that period: how to optimize, and again optimize, everything that I was coding. There were days when my code was rejected by my mentor and team lead because it wasn’t perfect. He would say, “If I can make it better, you can do it too.” So I went back to my “drawing board,” aka my brain and started to go through every bit in the assembler section of the code. Have you tried to read assembler code recently? That was to make you smile :) :) :).
For me it was always a struggle to align all the small “bricks”. This is how I called the assembler instructions, virtually in my imagination! You are right to judge me, I didn’t use my brain (it wasn’t enough), but IMAGINATION did the heavy lifting.
BYTE story
I had the “luxury” ;) to code some part of the project in pure C. You had to check, every allocated variable had been properly cleaned after use, so that no memory leak would bite you in the ass later, when you least expected it and send you back to the “drawing board” again. Every function that you created had to be nearly “perfect.” You can imagine the struggle of a newbie. I will be honest with you, this still haunts me today, and it makes me laugh from time to time. When I’m not under pressure: FIFO, FILO and all the other “funny” words were my dear friends, not my enemies.
And now the most funny part of the BITs and BYTEs, is how you debug what you have done :) :) :). You had to use OSCILLOSCOPE. Maybe some of the people reading this now will scratch their heads, asking what the hell is that — “ ask Claude or ChatGPT” :). I had countless nights looking at that screen (not the PC monitor!!! The other screen, the device you have just researched with AI) to see the line move from 0 to 1 (0V to 3.3V). This would indicate whether I had made things correctly or f.cked it up again. I’m smiling now, but back then it wasn’t funny at all. I think each of you had very similar stories like me .Pause for a second and try to think of a funny thing that makes you laugh now but, a few years back, was the one thing that would not let you sleep until you managed to fix that mother f.cker.
Python, PHP, HTML, etc. story
Having this previous work experience, I knew that I could do whatever was needed. Maybe it would take more time, but I knew that everything was possible. Many might say I’m wrong to state that, but this is my feeling and I have proved it to myself time and time again.
And now the BOTs
I was "forced" to start using the new “trendy” tool that started taking over the world and IT. I intentionally put the brakes on myself using these LLM models for at least one year, but after I saw its powers and of course its problems, I can say that I personally haven’t written a single line of code “manually” since February!!!!!! Do you think that I’m spoiled? My past still will not let me go, as I still like to have things under control and use prompts and not Agents.
I know what you are thinking: he still needs to control the BITs and BYTEs and …….. You are right!!! It is easy to switch to another tool, but habits are much more difficult to be changed, if it is possible at all. What is your opinion on that?
Prologue
How do I test the AI code efficiently - hahahahhahh, I do not have an answer :) nor the tool for that. One thing I realised is that it is hard and makes me swear a lot!! Like I did 25/20/10/5/1 years ago. The bottom line is that, it is always hard to create something, this will never change, but after a while, if you are smart, you will remember the funny parts of the process:
- Connecting 40 small processors to test them, the night before shipping to the customers. They looked like Xmas decorations. I made the LEDs blink in different colours ;).
- Pushing the PROD Release Button and lighting a candle :). It was a big release for an A-Level client after one year of development.
- You can’t party with Claude - it does not drink beer or vodka ;):):):) - do it with your human colleagues.
