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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

#71

Post by skydhash »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #54
sitkack wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s Pandas for Everyone by Daniel Chen.

What helped me with Pandas was a (very) short stint with array programming, specifically uiua. It gave me a good understanding of the possible operations on arrays.

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

#72

Post by LgLasagnaModel »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #54
sitkack wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this a setup??? :)

The guy two comments up wrote a great book on using pandas effectively. It’s called Effective Pandas

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

#73

Post by DontchaKnowit »

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.

The problem is that someone elses aha might not apply to your situation. The AI cant reason and generalize like a human can to apply lessons from someone else to you slightly different situation

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

#74

Post by skydhash »

strangescript wrote: post #30
bobbyraduloff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Code is formal language, there’s nothing to be solved because it’s already as precise as 2*2. The issue is not with programming language, the issue is the domain where the problem is and the human that does translate the solution.

Let’s take text rendering. We already have words on papers and various ways to get them there. But doing the same with computer is a difficult job because of all the parameters for drawing characters and laying them to form words and lines. Once you find those parameters, you have to account for future changes so you write you code in a way that minimize that impact. And because someone else will probably do maintenance, you try to come up with good abstractions so that your solution become understandable.

If AI will solve coding, it may as well write machine code directly or be embedded as firmware, because every programming language was made for humans.

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

#75

Post by bayindirh »

skydhash wrote: post #68
alanfranz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

I also wonder if people truly learned their IDE. Even xCode with all its warts have nice feature for completion, debugging, profiling, documentation,… It seems like all they know is VS Code which is neither a good editor, nor a good IDE.

From my experience, people are really wary of learning the tool they're using to code, because any editor similar to VSCode fulfills their needs.

However, as you said, mastering a proper IDE is a superpower and allows much more to be done in a single window in a shorter amount of time.

Also, since VSCode is everywhere, getting people off of it, or showing much capable software is a sad and moot effort, from my experience, again. KDEs humble KATE is much better than VSCode on many fronts.

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

#76

Post by amoss »

codr7 wrote: post #65

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me. Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction. Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill. Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll…

It reminds me of the Hamming quote:

"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."

Each of those little interruptions is a clue about the wider state of the world (codebase / APIs etc). AI offers a shortcut, but it does not provide the same mental world-building.

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

#77

Post by sevensor »

codr7 wrote: post #65

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me. Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction. Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill. Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll…

Reformatting data is the very last thing I’d trust an LLM to do. What if it picks numbers it likes better? Compiler won’t catch that.

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

#78

Post by bmink »

codr7 wrote: post #65

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me. Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction. Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill. Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll…

Exactly this, though for me a lot of boilerplate is actually a comfort zone that I often look forward to, the way an athlete might to a light jog. Earbuds in, forget about everything, crank it out.

(That said your point is valid — there is boilerplate that is tedious and the resulting pain will be motivation to improve things)

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

#79

Post by spacemadness »

My anxiety for where this is all going is as follows. Using AI for all your coding is a wet dream for CEOs because the goal is to fire all their engineering staff except for a handful of maintainers. However, it reminds me of trying to explain to your stakeholders why you need time to work on tech debt before it becomes a problem. There is no metric now that says there is a problem that’s easily measured but engineers are grinding their teeth trying to work within a system that is slowly degrading and is showing signs.

“Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?”

Likewise, the brainrot and lost knowledge, as well as possible new tech debt that fewer engineers working in their codebase understand, will eventually cause issues down the line. The same pressures will ensue causing stakeholders to ignore all the signs of degradation.

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

#80

Post by elia_42 »

Really interesting and I agree with everything. With my team we always try to improve our programming skills without AI, even though we all recognize its great utility.

Today every type of problem and every type of solution seems to have to be solved with AI, when there are more creative, original and artisanal ways to solve them (even if, sometimes, they need more time and patience)

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