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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#141

Post by JamesonNetworks »

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…

Its an interesting observation for sure, but those developers for mobile and web sit at the tippy top of all other abstractions layers. At that position a certain amount of boiler plate is needed because not all controls and code behind are the same, and there is a mighty collection of hacks on hacks to get a lot of things done. I think this is more of “horses for courses” thing where developers higher in the abstraction stack will always benefit from LLMs more and developers lower down the stack have more agency for improvement. At the end of the day, I think everyone gets more productive which is a net positive. Its just that not all developers are after the same goal (Application dev vs library devs vs system devs)

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#142

Post by Der_Einzige »

thebeardisred wrote: post #43

With all due respect to the author, I take umbrage with the statement "They never end up in the terminal, because that is a huge jump in complexity, usability, and frustration from using something like Airtable or Notion." Using the command line isn't more complex, it's differently complex. It's differently complex and writ large, schools make no effort to teach it.

Movies about nerds getting bullied who later used command lines to do nerd shit have left a generation of folks afraid of any command line anything. There’s a guy who got accused of being a terrorist just because he used a command line on an airplane.

Don’t believe me? Look at the “Linux porn” and “ricer” communities on Reddit, who go out of their way to make their systems look as “TUI cool” as possible, complete with customized tiling WMs. Most of the people doing this do it because they’re going for the “l33t h4x0r” vibes.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#143

Post by bitwize »

Back in the day (1970s-1980s), every computer came with BASIC or something preinstalled -- often in ROM. Growing up I thought computers were for programming as bikes were for riding or pencils were for writing with. Using someone else's program was always an option, but you always had the full capability of the machine ready to put to your own uses, and an easy way to get started.

We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We gave the user ever more elaborate premade applications, which is nice; meanwhile, programming environments went from the default mode of interaction with the machine to expensive add-ins (thinking of early Windows with Visual Basic and ToolBook). HyperCard was free on the Mac, but didn't keep pace with the machine's expanding capabilities. QBasic was perfect for the DOS environment, but it didn't really transition to Windows except as Visual Basic, which again was an expensive add-on. Speaking of, even the RAD tools of yesteryear are largely gone. We have open-source dev environments now, but they aren't approachable the way microcomputer BASIC was. Getting someone set up with Node or even Rails requires command-line jiggery-pokery and installing all sorts of dependencies, just to get started.

And now, we're somehow hoping that a somewhat cleverer Dissociated Press is going to bring back citizen programmers? Fuck no. If we want end users to program their own apps, we have to find our way out of the shit we created, not add new layers of shit to deal with the old layers. The pathway to citizen programmers is making programming accessible, with full capabilities available, with documentation, right from the jump. No toy languages (e.g. Small Basic). Kids should be able to write turtle-drawing programs with the same language/environment adults use to build real-world applications.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#144

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zer00eyz wrote: post #16
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad…

> we have power over & can shape & share This is where She's being way too optimistic. What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds. She thinks the tools we have are going to enable home cooking. Software is way harder than that. The step between is "local" restaurants. You dont need to build software for 8 billion people, or 300 million Americans. You can build for a region, or a niche group. > It allows…

> What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds.

What we have now is often software that looks like a food hall: it has to contain all the features that anyone interested in some general area of functionality might want.

She thinks that sometimes it's going to be good to just cook up a Thai meal because that's all you actually need/want right now.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#145

Post by Gormo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
logicallee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Sure it is, just like a child or someone not very good at reasoning. That's a good way to think about it. Treat GPT-4 as having mentality of a 4 year old kid. A kid this age will take any question you ask at face value, because it hasn't learned yet that adults often don't ask questions precisely enough, don't realize the assumptions they make in their requests, don't know what they don't know, and are full of shit…

Another similarity is that 4-year-olds will often pick up words and phrases from people around them, and learn associations between those words and phrases without yet having learned their meanings or having any of their own experiences to relate them to.

So a young child might answer your question with a response that he heard other people say to a similar question, without actually understanding what he's saying. LLMs are basically this at a grand scale.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#146

Post by KittenInABox »

moooo99 wrote: post #131
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the new thing that will be happening is that junior developers are dependent on chatgpt and ai for a knowledge base, which is itself powered by companies completely outside of their control. Worst case scenario is that I can always write my own interpreter, with which I can write my own development environments, etc etc. because I have the knowledge. New developers will end up in a state where if chatgpt decides to ban you from their services your career is SOL.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#147

Post by flutas »

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…

> what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN.

I've actually seen it happen using exactly that.

A (non-tech) person trying to write an inventory management software for their company (which is highly regulated and inspected) using Google AppSheets.

No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them... 6 months and much of their sanity later they gave up.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#148

Post by dagw »

flutas wrote: post #147
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…

> what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. I've actually seen it happen using exactly that. A (non-tech) person trying to write an inventory management software for their company (which is highly regulated and inspected) using Google AppSheets. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them... 6 months and much of their s…

I've seen it happen too. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them...6 month later they had a weird hacky solution that solved their problem and was used across the company and on the whole seemed to do what the relevant people needed it to do.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#149

Post by generic92034 »

KittenInABox wrote: post #146
moooo99 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think the new thing that will be happening is that junior developers are dependent on chatgpt and ai for a knowledge base, which is itself powered by companies completely outside of their control. Worst case scenario is that I can always write my own interpreter, with which I can write my own development environments, etc etc. because I have the knowledge. New developers will end up in a state where if chatgpt deci…

> New developers will end up in a state where if chatgpt decides to ban you from their services your career is SOL.

Is that not an unlikely thing to happen at least for developers working as company employees? The company I am working for has a contract with several LLM providers and there is no option to ban individual employees, as far as I am aware.

For freelancing developers the risks might be greater, but then you are usually not starting as a freelancer as a junior.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#150

Post by JohnFen »

rickydroll wrote: post #139
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…

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…

> If you had one or more junior programmers working for you writing code according to what you specify, would you have the same worry?

It's a great question. My answer generally is yes, I would (and do), but I'm willing to sacrifice a bit in order to ensure that the junior developer gets enough practical experience that they can succeed in their career. I'm not willing to make such a sacrifice for a machine.

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