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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#161

Post by jdougan »

skadamat wrote: post #19

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

Also: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/a-small-matter-of-pro...

Makes the observation that there are intermediate users that are a natural target for end-user programming.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#162

Post by rickydroll »

manuel_w wrote: post #154
rickydroll wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Can you please write a blog post on what tools you use…

sure. I've been meaning to do a comparison of aqua and dragon. I'll do one of co-pilot and gpt-whatever. give me 6 months or so, I've got marketing to do. :-)

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#163

Post by bitwize »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #152
bitwize wrote: post #143

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…

> We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We forwent this in favor of empowering the huge number of people who didn't want to program, who just wanted to use the computer to be able to do (nonprogramming) things.

It's not either/or. You shouldn't have to program, but programming should be made available to you by default.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#164

Post by rickydroll »

finnthehuman wrote: post #160
rickydroll wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? I try hard to avoid the scenario where junior programmers write things they don’t understand. That’s actually my biggest frustration and the difference between juniors I enjoy vs loathe working with. There are only so many ways to remain supportive and gently say “no, for real, learn…

Thank you for explaining. I totally agree with you about being supportive and the level of capability.

For me, both Copilot and ChatGPT are reasonably skilled junior programmers. They understand about 70% of what I'm looking for. I can correct them with one revised prompt and get them to the 80 to 90% range. At three prompts, I assume GPT/Co-Pilot is an idiot.

In both cases of non-bio and bio junior programmers, I always ask myself the question, how am I explaining it wrong? More often with bio junior programmers, I am explaining it wrong. With nonbio junior programs, it's still giving the wrong explanation, but in a different way.

The closest analogy to this experience is learning how to use speech recognition. You get to about the 95% recognition level by the system learning how you speak. You get to the 98, 99% recognition level by speaking the way the system hears

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#165

Post by mrweasel »

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…

Years back, I don't know 15 - 17 years ago, I got hired as a .Net developer. I worked with people a lot smarter than me, and some who just didn't really knew what the hell they where doing. But everyone is nice and help each other. One day a less experience colleague is asking whole bunch of small trivial questions, one after another, for the duration of the day. Me and another co-worker, busy with our own stuff, answer the questions as quickly and succinctly as possible. At the end of the afternoon the guy finally ask if we could look at his code, because he can't really make it work. Every question he had asked was a small building block to whatever he was working on, but now he was stuck because in his context he was asking the wrong questions and every time something wasn't working he'd just attempt to slap on more code. There was no design, no rational plan for how this was even suppose to work.

In this case we took our colleague to a whiteboard, and helped him do an actual design and helped him ask the right questions. LLMs won't question what you're doing, they will happily answer all your questions and help you pile on line after line of broken logic.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#166

Post by gradientsrneat »

skadamat wrote: post #19

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

I don't remember if it was Geoffrey Litt, or someone else, but I used to follow a few people in that noosphere on Twitter. One of them promoted a short film which was captioned (paraphrasing), "this man made this film all by himself," even though there was clearly a live female actor in it. There was that, and then sexist remarks, possibly by one or two different accounts, at unrelated times.

Anyway, whoever they were, good riddance.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#168

Post by wonger_ »

sprobertson wrote: post #87
skadamat wrote: post #19

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

Where would one find more?

Ink and switch has several projects and articles: https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Some folks from Ink and switch made a podcast that I've really liked: https://museapp.com/podcast/

Bret Victor (from Dynamicland) has lots of projects, articles, and talks: https://worrydream.com/Home2011/

The future of coding has a newsletter and a podcast, but I haven't dug into them: https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#169

Post by objectivetruth »

matrix87 wrote: post #33

It isn't even that high of a barrier for entry though? If someone really wants a piece of software that does something, there's probably already some python library for it. calling some imported python function isn't hard if someone is too lazy to find some python library to import, but driven enough to come up with an unambiguous way of telling a model to do something in natural language, that's a borderline non-exi…

[dead]

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#170

Post by jdougan »

liampulles wrote: post #92
Bjorkbat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far." I actually do agree with you on that, as you say its just the best we've discovered so far. But if there is a better model which is as versatile and easy to use, I'm totally open to it.

I think Lotus Improv was on to something.
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