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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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131–140 of 179 posts

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#131

Post by moooo99 »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #129
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.

> building on top of technologies that they do not understand, powered by companies they do not control.

Isn’t that pretty much the status quo?

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#132

Post by noworriesnate »

WJW wrote: post #126
noworriesnate wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a joke because Stackoverflow is notorious for answering questions with "you shouldn't be doing that, do something else"

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#133

Post by maccard »

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…

I think you’re right that the majority of people do not want to learn, but in my experience there are a large number of engineers were who fit into that category, just as there are pockets of other professions that are willing to learn explore and improve. But

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#134

Post by maccard »

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…

The barrier to entry for programming couldn’t really be much lower. Pretty much everyone with a computer can write and run JavaScript in their browser, and there are even web based environments and editors like GitHub code spaces.

Google docs has a pretty neat JavaScript api that can be used from inside the apps themselves too.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#135

Post by m0llusk »

okwhateverdude wrote: post #95
analog31 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that even the SWE's are annoyed by the UI's of typical enterprise software and websites, and by gratuitous UI churn.

Only because I, as a SWE, know how that sausage is made. Either it is some misguided desire to show a customer that you're working on the product ("See, we're still alive, please keep paying us money!"), some PM or UI designer stuffing their promo packet ("Look at how much increased engagement we have!" by making users now click twice as much), or to satisfy the whim of some c-level sponsor. Rarely is the UI actually…

That's great, but can you make the Buy button bigger?

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#136

Post by leke »

Really interesting article. It feels a little like what I heard about VisualBasic and REBOL back in the day. AI definitely helps, but I'm still not convinced it will be able to create anything but really simple apps. Likely it will facilitate those people who are maxing out tools like Excel even further.

As well as being a professional developer, I also do these local first types of apps, so I expect once the AI tools become good enough, we will be the first to figure out how to use them.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#137

Post by Gormo »

logicallee wrote: post #97
deafpolygon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate Therein lies the mistake. Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. It is simply just giving you what is likely the 'correct' answer based on some sort of pattern. It doesn't know what's wrong, so it's not aware it's gi…

>Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. Sure it is, just like a child or someone not very good at reasoning. You can test ChatGPT yourself on some totally novel ad hoc reasoning task you invent for the task, with a single correct conclusion that takes reasoning to arrive at and it will probably get it if it's really easy, even if you take great pains to make it something…

A child or unintelligent person may make errors when attempting to engage in reasoning -- applying the wrong deductive rules, or applying the right ones incorrectly, or applying them to invalid premises -- but LLMs are not even attempting to engage in reasoning in the first place. They are applying no deductive rules, and have no semantic awareness of any of their inputs, so cannot even determine whether they are correct or incorrect.

LLMs are simply making probabilistic inferences about what "words" (tokenized particles of language, not necessarily individual words from our perspetive) are most likely to appear in relation to other words, based on the training data fed into them.

Their output often resembles reasoning simply because the training data contains large amounts of explicit reasoning in it. But there is no actual reasoning process going on in response to your prompt, just probabilistic inference about what words are most closely correlated with the words in your prompt.

If you're getting what appear to be reasoned responses to "novel" prompts, then one of two things is likely happening: either (a) your prompt isn't as novel or unique as you thought it was, and the model's probabilistic inference was sufficient to generate a valid response without reasoning, or (b) the response isn't as well-reasoned as it appears, and you are failing to notice its errors.

If you want to genuinely test an LLM's ability to engage in reasoning, try throwing a complex math problem at it, or a logic puzzle that trips most people up.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#138

Post by ddj231 »

lumb63 wrote: post #122
mlsu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Typescri…

To add to this, LLMs write pretty trite poetry, for example. If we think of code from the creative side, it’s hard to imagine that we’d want to simply hand all coding over to these systems. Even if we got working solutions (which is a major undertaking for large systems), it seems we’d be sacrificing elegance, novelty, and I’d argue more interesting explorations.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#139

Post by rickydroll »

JohnFen wrote: post #29
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…

> 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…

This all depends on your mental relationship with the LLM. As somebody else pointed out, this is an issue of delegation. If you had one or more junior programmers working for you writing code according to what you specify, would you have the same worry?

I treat LLMs as junior programmers. They can make my life easier and occasionally make it harder. With that mindset, you start out knowing that they're going to make stupid mistakes, and that builds your skill of detecting mistakes in other people's code. Also, like with biological junior programmers, nonbiological junior programmers quickly show how bad you are giving direction and force you to improve that skill.

I don't write code by hand because my hands are broken, and I can't use the keyboard long enough to write any significant amount of code. I've developed a relationship with nonbiological junior programmers such that I now tell them, via speech recognition, what to write and what information they need to create code that looks like code I used to create by hand.

Does this keep me from learning new skills? No. I'm always making new mistakes and how to correct them. One of those corrections was knowing that you don't learn something significant from writing code. Career-sustaining knowledge comes at a much higher level.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#140

Post by seabird »

mikro2nd wrote: post #101
seabird wrote: post #69

People just don't care and won't do it if it requires more than a fleeting thought to get it done. Excel is comically powerful and only a tiny fraction of users have any interest in tapping into that. Every step of the way, for the last 50 years, pretty much all parties involved have actively worked to move away from end-user programming. Words can't describe how happy I would be if that wasn't the case, but it's bet…

I think the point is that, rather than "requiring everybody on the planet to reevaluate how they interact with a computer", Maggie's idea is that computers should be reevaluated with regard to how they interact with people. Like another person earlier in these comments, I am much more skeptical than her that LLMs are "the answer" to enabling non-professional-programmers to create -- more importantly to modify and com…

People love the very notion of an app. Computers went from something every user was expected to program to some extent to that brittle black box because users didn't want to program, they just want the benefits of software spoonfed to them. "We" evaluated the world where the computer was beholden to the non-programmer users ("our AS/400 administrator is some guy from supply chain, I put his data in an Access database for our team to process"), and then Apple made a gazillion dollars with "apps" because your average user thinks that shit is for dorks and a waste of their time. You would be floored at how many young people don't even own a computer beyond their phone because they see so little benefit to something they have control over. It is very much a values issue in the population at large.
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