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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#121

Post by tech2 »

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…

Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation of some kind of UI. All of these have a database under the hood. The combination of the two allowed a lot of small groups to make quite complicated systems for a single platform.

Now there's an expectation for things to be web-based and the entry point feels less obvious than it used to be.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#122

Post by lumb63 »

mlsu wrote: post #105
TeMPOraL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, your objection isn't to LLMs, it's to delegation , since the exact same argument would apply to having "some magical thing that could write my code for me" be your co-worker or a contractor. It's fair for the type of code you want to write for your own growth. But even with that, there's more than enough bullshit boilerplate and trivial cross-language differences that contribute zero (or negatively) t…

If that's the only thing LLMs are good for, my money for improving software productivity is in good old fashioned developer tools. A better language reduces boilerplate. A better compiler helps you reason about errors. Better language features help you be more expressive. If I need to spool up a jet turbine feeding H100's just to decipher my error messages, the solution is a better compiler, not a larger jet engine.…

One of my fears with the growing use of LLMs for writing software is that people are using them as a catch-all that prevents them from feeling the pain that indicates to us that there is a better way to do something.

For example, nobody would ever have developed RAII if manual memory management didn’t peeve them. Nobody would have come up with C if they didn’t feel the pain of assembly, or Rust without C, or Typescript without JavaScript, etc. Nobody would have come up with dozens of the genius tools that allow us to understand and reason about our software and enable us to debug it or write it better, had they not personally and acutely felt the pain.

At my job, the people most enthusiastic about LLMs for coding are the mobile and web devs. They say it saves them a lot of time spent writing silly boilerplate code. Shouldn’t the presence of that boilerplate code be the impetus that drives someone to create a better system? The entire firmware team has no interest in the technology, because there isn’t much boilerplate in C. Every line means something.

I worry LLMs will lead to terrible or nonexistent abstractions in code, making it opaque, or inefficient, or incorrect, or all of the above.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#123

Post by anymouse123456 »

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…

Of course you're right about today's LLMs, but the author imagines a not-too-unlikely incremental improvement on them unlocking an entirely new surface area of solutions.

I really enjoyed the notion of barefoot developers, local first solutions, and the desire to wrest control over our our digital lives from the financialists.

I find these ideas compelling, even though I'm politically anti-communist.

The presentation was also quite lovely.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#124

Post by eru »

advael wrote: post #117
eru wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, your argument could also be used against compilers. Or against language features like strong typing in something like Rust, instead of avoiding our bugs through very careful analysis when writing C code like God intended. Using an LLM _is_ a skill, too.

I agree it's a skill, but I actually think hear this analogy a lot and think it's not a great one A feedback loop with an LLM is useful for refinement of ideas and speeding up common tasks. I really even think it can be a massive productivity boost for one of the most common professional dev tasks with the right tooling. I work a lot of mercenary gigs and need to learn new languages all the time, and something like p…

I mostly agree about a certain layer of semantics in our 'normal' programming languages. And most of the time, that level is good and good enough. But whether eg certain compiler optimisations kick in or not is sometimes much harder to forecast.

Btw, currently I wouldn't even dare to compare LLMs to compilers. For me the relevant comparison would be to 'Googling StackOverflow': really important tools for a programmer, but nothing you can rely on to give you good code. Nevertheless they are tools whose mastery is an important skill.

Remember how in yesteryears we complained about people copy-and-pasting from StackOverflow? Just like today we complain about people committing the output of their LLM directly.

---

I do hope that mechanical assistance in programming keeps improving over time. I have quite a few tricky technical problems that I would like to see solved in my lifetimes.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#125

Post by aragilar »

zokier wrote: post #119

I wish people gushing on ML code generation would familiarize themselves with SW development history bit more. For example the introduction of SEQUEL (predecessor of SQL) paper is worth reading, its just few pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almade... Key quote: > Much of the success of the computer industry depends on developing a class of users other than trained computer specialists I be…

Or more recent attempts to skill up researchers like Software Carpentries (which had been going for 25+ years!). Getting them to internalise that software is understandable (in spite of our attempts to make it not...) is a long process, and LLMs will only make that process longer.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#126

Post by WJW »

noworriesnate wrote: post #50
Turing_Machine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No This really, really, really needs to be fixed. It's probably the most irritating (and potentially risky) part of the whole ecosystem. Nothing more infuriating than being give code that not only doesn't work, but upon the most casual inspection, couldn't possibly work -- especially when it's done it four or five times in a row, each time assuri…

This problem will be solved with a vengeance when the next OpenAI model is released, because it will incorporate Stackoverflow content[1]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-gi...

What will StackOverflow content teach the model that millions of pages of programming language documentation, github repos and developer blogs could not? SO is nice but it's hardly the only source of programming knowledge out there.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#127

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #103
FlyingSnake wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every “Copy-Paste from SO” answer was accompanied with lots of caveats from other human commentators. This feedback loop is sorely missing with LLM coding assistants.

LLMs literally read all that commentary in training, so they're taking it into account, not regurgitating the top-voted answer from SO. They're arguably better at this than junior devs.

While LLMs are better at reading the surrounding context, I am not convinced they are particularly good at taking it on board (compared to an adult human, obviously fantastic compared to any previous NLP).

Biggest failure mode I experience with LLMs is a very human-like pattern, what looks like corresponding with an interlocutor who absolutely does not understand a core point you raised 5 messages earlier and have re-emphasised on each incorrect response:

--

>>> x

>> y

> not y, x

oh, right, I see… y

--

etc.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#128

Post by _heimdall »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #85
_heimdall wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"running yourself over with a car" feels very different from "learning to use LLMs to your advantage".

The GP was pointing out that learning to use an LLM, in their opinion, would stop them from learning other new skills and erode their existing ones.

In that context I think the analogy holds. Using an LLM halts your learning, as does running yourself over with a car. It's an exaggerated point for sure, but I think it points to the fact that you don't have to learn to use LLMs simply because it's a skill you could learn, especially if you think it will harm you long term.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#129

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

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…

The new generation of devs are going to be barefoot and pregnant and kept in the kitchen, building on top of technologies that they do not understand, powered by companies they do not control.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#130

Post by charlieyu1 »

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…

Partly disagree, actually. The current web technologies are somewhat unnecessarily complicated. Most people just need basic CRUD and a useable front end for their daily tasks.
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