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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

#51

Post by sitkack »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #45
mvieira38 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems

It doesn't help that AI generally creates very mediocre Pandas code (based on a lot of the training data showing mediocre practices).

Pandas is a very difficult api to use correctly and a huge swath of programs that the AIs have trained on was "programmed by accident" meaning people just typed stuff at it until they got the output they wanted.

To offset all the bad code, you would have to make a Pandas fine tune and/or ablate the bad Pandas from the weights.

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

#52

Post by svaha1728 »

porvertylk wrote: post #10
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…

>majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment I wonder if music is the best example, because if I recall it has been always like this for musicians. Never have I heard that in my, my parents or grandparents time Musician was a career you would get in for money

When I was young I got to meet a lot of the aging jazz musicians of the 1930s in Kansas City. It absolutely was a career here. Granted, that’s a distant memory for most people.

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

#53

Post by sitkack »

tmtvl wrote: post #50
pyfon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort if makes me want to learn Lisp. Maybe if every line packs a lot of punch and you need fewer of them, you can do things AI can't do yet. I think AI would struggle with Lisp since in Lisp, you engineer a language for the task. AI tends to be good on languages it is trained on. For now!

If you're ever bored for a weekend I'd recommend reading through the Reasoned Schemer, or at least the final chapter and the appendices to see how a simple Kanren can be implemented. It's what got me to properly appreciate macros.

I think the best way to learn Lisp is to make a Lisp.

Two routes, I would recommend both.

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

https://t3x.org/

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

#54

Post by DontchaKnowit »

sitkack wrote: post #51
__mharrison__ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that AI generally creates very mediocre Pandas code (based on a lot of the training data showing mediocre practices).

Pandas is a very difficult api to use correctly and a huge swath of programs that the AIs have trained on was "programmed by accident" meaning people just typed stuff at it until they got the output they wanted. To offset all the bad code, you would have to make a Pandas fine tune and/or ablate the bad Pandas from the weights.

Does anyone have good reference material on learning how to use pandas effectively and understanding the api as a whole?

Any time ive had to use pandas I am shocked at how convuluted and opaque the docs are, and end up just hacking away till something wirks alright.

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

#55

Post by alanfranz »

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).

With the difference that intelli* is usually correct - i.e. it fetches all the possible methods from actual code, and you can see the related api docs. It’s another view for the same data (more or less - of course there can be docs other than api docs)

With AI you’ve got no idea whether something is right, it’s a probablistic thing

That’s why I don’t buy the “AI as just another abstraction layer” argument. AI is something different and we should use it differently.

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

#56

Post by ath3nd »

lo_fye wrote: post #47

>>It won’t design your domain layer with the care and consideration that >>comes from deep experience and hard-won knowledge. What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.

To me, knowledge is about knowing things, intelligence is about being able to apply your knowledge at the right context and for the right reasons.

The current crop of LLMs has a lot of knowledge, but severely lacks on the "intelligence" part. Sure, it can "guess" how to write a unit test consistent with your codebase (based on examples), but for those 1% where you need to make a deviation from the rule, it's completely clueless how to do it properly. Guessing is not intelligence, although it might appear masked as such.

Don't get me wrong, the "guessing" part is sometimes uncannily good, but it just can't replace real reasoning.

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

#57

Post by noio »

jstummbillig wrote: post #46

I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them. Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction. But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the con…

> thinking, contemplating and deadlock

This is what I’d call ‘programming’. Which you’ll still be doing even if the AI is writing the code.

The question is whether you can become good/better at programming without writing code?

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

#59

Post by lm28469 »

bovermyer wrote: post #49
lm28469 wrote: post #4

But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.

There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about…

Hate it all you want, the vast majority of "programmers" aren't working on anything novel, meaningful or hard. For the vast majority of people it's just a job, it's not a hobby, it's not a passion, it's not something they dream about, it's just a thing that they have to do 8 hours a day to make money and go do stuff in the real world. They don't want to think about it on walks, they don't want to cry about it, they don't want to dream about it and solve problems in their fucking sleep

AI is liberating them because it automatise 80% of their work, and there is nothing wrong about that. Most people work on projects that won't even exist in 10 years, let's stop pretending we're all working on Apollo tier software... Coding isn't a craft, it's not an art, it's a job in which you spend the vast majority of your time fucking up your eyes and spine to piss code for companies treating you like cattle.

For every """code artisan""" you have a thousand people who'd be as excited about working in a car factory or flipping burgers, it just so happens that tech working conditions are better

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

#60

Post by beej71 »

kevmo314 wrote: post #26
rco8786 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aside: I can't stand popups when I'm coding. I always have to change it to something more manual or it just breaks up my flow. ^K to bring up a man page from vim is great--that's what I'm after.
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