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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#71

Post by mangamadaiyan »

charlie0 wrote: post #45

Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…

A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically minded people -- have trouble with changing UIs, and it is not about them not wanting to think. Consider that the UI could be part of a workflow that is more of a side annoyance than their main job, and that they would rather conserve their mental bandwidth for problems that are more important to them. A doctor shouldn't have to get used to a new timesheet UI just because a designer woke up one fine morning with a new thought.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#72

Post by zem »

liampulles wrote: post #31

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradu…

couldn't agree more - i love the whole idea of barefoot developers, the analogy with china's barefoot doctors was superb, but all the time i was thinking what we need is visual basic and access and hypercard revamped for the internet era, not LLM-generated code.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#73

Post by theamk »

llm_trw wrote: post #65
theamk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not likely. Have you seen AI code review tools? They are just as bad as any other AI products - it has a similar chance of fixing a defect or introducing a new one.

They are not there to fix defect, they are there to detect them.

Sure, but it's LLM - so this would be mix of some of the real defects (but not all of them) and a totally fake defects which do not actually need fixing. This is not going to help junior developers figure out good from bad.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#74

Post by x0x0 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #51
x0x0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of disagree. chatgpt will make something that looks much more like it should work than your copy-pasted code from stackoverflow. It looks like it does exactly what you want. It's just riddled with bugs. Major (invented an api out of whole cloth; it would sure be convenient if that api did exist tho!) or subtle (oh, this bash script will bedshit and even overwrite data if your paths have spaces.) Or it will hap…

You’re kind of saying some of what I am trying to so I’m not sure we disagree. I boil down the core problem described to being roughly: people lacking expertise to judge code advice critically are putting bad code they do not understand into places they shouldn’t. This is the problem that is not new. LLM’s are a variation on the problem because they have the downside of not allowing you to view for yourself the surro…

Ah, you're right, apologies for not reading your comment more carefully.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#75

Post by shagie »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #66
liampulles wrote: post #31

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradu…

I largely agree with you. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful no-code/low-code tool out there in that they've enabled millions of people to automate some task or complex process and effectively become programmers, despite the fact that I personally find an empty spreadsheet to be kind of intimidating to look at. I think the only point of disagreement we might have is that I don't necessarily think that the…

A spreadsheet is lisp under the covers. Be it =IF(test, then, else) or (if test then else) - that's just syntax of a functional language dialect.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#76

Post by throwanem »

skydhash wrote: post #58
throwanem wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this.…

The thing is you can learn a lot with a bootable FreeBSD usb, an old PC and a copy of the "Absolute FreeBSD" or the equivalent for Linux. I strongly believe that anyone who is not willing to put in the time to learn those stuff won't be able to do anything custom with computers. Shortcut has been there for years now and most people haven't touch it. Many only learn a few actions that apps provide and are content. The…

Hence the time the talk spends dwelling on how this isn't an "everyone" thing any more than it's a "professional devs" thing. The point, or at least the point as I understood it, is to broaden the space for people who want to learn enough to support the things that matter to them, and no more.

Again, there's nothing new in this; in fact it's much the way things were when 8-bit micros and BASIC were about as fancy as most ever saw, yet anyone who ever saw a computer could hardly help but see them. Maybe you'd learn to use those tools and maybe you wouldn't, but you knew they were there for you and the assumption was that you could learn enough to use them. More did than I think a lot of folks in their 20s today easily imagine. I don't blame them; if all I'd ever seen was how things are now, I'm sure I'd be the same. But people made things the way they are now. People can make them otherwise.

There's also no assumption in the talk that everyone involved is a loner, an atomized individual, the way you seem to assume would be true. Indeed, quite the contrary: community, in word and in concept, suffuses the text in its entirety, to such an extent it seems surprising its constant immanence could be overlooked even on a brief skim.

Admittedly, that's a difficult concept for many to fathom in 2020s America. I'm certainly among that number. But I'm also old enough to remember when things were better, and young enough still to imagine a future where things are better again. I just hope I'm not too old to still make myself useful by the time they start to be.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#78

Post by _heimdall »

fragmede wrote: post #40
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept This. If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using them would prevent me from learning new skills and would actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade. The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that discourag…

It sounds like you've discouraged yourself from learning the skill of using an LLM to help you code.

That only matters if the assumption is that any skill is worth learning simply because it's a skill.

You could learn the skill of running yourself over with a car, but it's either a skill you'll never use or the last skill you'll use. Either way, you're probably just as well off not bothering to learn that one.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#79

Post by kragen »

flir wrote: post #60
kragen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?

Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.

ideally, things as different as possible from excel!

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#80

Post by yoyohello13 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #35
9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

This is not really a new problem, the previous version being "idk, I copy pasted it from stack overflow." True expertise realized that the answer often lay buried in sub-comments and the top voted answer is not often the correct one. LLM's naturally do not realize any of this.

At least “copy paste from stack overflow” was kind of a in joke. There was a little social stigma about it. Everyone knew they were being lazy and they really shouldn’t be doing it.

LLMs are different because devs declare with pride that they “saved so much time” by just letting chatGPT do it for them.

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