The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work.
I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a big company
Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people on the team who seem completely obsessed with the project, like its their main hobby/purpose
It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
sometimes, you just find fun in things and it's cool. other times, it's like what other other thing you gonna do? fish or hang with people or do drugs or dance? software's a hobby really. sometimes its more fun.
but really it's all preference.
I've always prided myself on taking a craftsman-like approach to software engineering... thinking deeply about interfaces, ownership, lifetimes, how the public API looks, how using the public API feels...
Lately, though, with the advent of LLM-assisted coding this mindset is starting to feel hollow. Why spend 1.5x as long crafting something robust when, in all likelihood, it will be replaced or refactored by LLM tooling within the next 5 or 10 years?
For example, the syscalls for linux are never changing IMO. The cost is unbounded to change, even with AI.
Should your APIs be treated any different?
At the very least, the LLMs work better with better APIs and data models, which yet accelerates the solving of problems.