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Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

cekrem.github.io

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Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#21

Post by schaefer »

boredemployee wrote: post #7

"It’s about maintaining the human element in a craft that’s increasingly automated." I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late. didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years? Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almos…

There's a difference between having an opinion that a particular future is unavoidable, and choosing to live in that world before it even arrives.

Not a single book on the NYT bestseller list is written by AI.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#22

Post by bradly »

cjs_ac wrote: post #2

> The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance. It implies delegating not just tasks but judgment itself. Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know…

> I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant

I left Shopify a couple weeks ago and Tobi is very, very all-in on AI being an integral part of all jobs at Shopify.

Tobi said that how you use AI is now an official part of your review, and that for any new recs, you need to show that the job can't be done by an ai. I left shortly after the memo so I do not know if things have changed.

Shopify also brought in a very AI CTO a few months ago that internally has been... interesting to say the least.

Also, anecdotally, the quality of code at Shopify was declining rapidly (leaderships words, not mine). All sorts of code-reds and yellows were happening to try and wrangle quality. This isn't Blind so no need for the gore and opinions, but we'll have to see how this shakes out for Shopify.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#23

Post by shinycode »

boredemployee wrote: post #7

"It’s about maintaining the human element in a craft that’s increasingly automated." I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late. didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years? Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almos…

Going this route, what’s the point of of learning anything if everything is instantly accessible from an AI with working solutions ? So no learning = no teaching or teaching that feels useless. That’s a weird and dangerous road. Everyone should own this technology for the situation to be balanced, not private or country based. Because we make ourself kind of useless in the process we loose leverage and value and we are at the mercy of the powerful ones

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#25

Post by bobbyraduloff »

strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#26

Post by kevmo314 »

rco8786 wrote: post #20
ericyd wrote: post #17

I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.

This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).

I do read the docs a lot less now though with IntelliSense, so if my craft were reading and understanding docs I'd probably be measurably disappointed by this future.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#27

Post by bobbyraduloff »

Very good article. I try to (respectfully) push my coworkers in this direction but it’s a bit of a lost cause.

I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors.

People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#28

Post by ori_b »

strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

I don't reach for calculators so often. When numbers are small or mental approximations will do, it's simply faster to do it in my head. And I'm not even good at mental math.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#29

Post by svieira »

strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

I am not sure if you are serious, but I literally DO this, not just for multiplication, but for lots of automatable things.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#30

Post by strangescript »

bobbyraduloff wrote: post #25
strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.

There is more complicated math systems that computers have solved, just like Chess, and Go. Systems that seemed impossible for a machine to beat and eventually they do.

Coding will be exactly the same soon.

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