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Code is cheap. Show me the talk

nadh.in

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Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#31

Post by dbtablesorrows »

negamax wrote: post #13

I keep on wondering how much of the AI embrace is marketing driven. Yes, it can produce value and cut corners. But it seems like self driving by 2016 Musk prediction. Which never happened. With IPO/Stock valuations closely tied to hype, I wonder if we are all witnessing a giant bubble in the making How much of this is mass financial engineering than real value. Reading a lot of nudges how everyone should have Google…

I realize many are disappointed (especially by technical churn, star-based-development JS projects on github without technical rigour). I don't trust any claim on the open web if I don't know the technical background of the person making it.

However I think - Nadh, ronacher, the redis bro - these are people who can be trusted. I find Nadh's article (OP) quite balanced.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#32

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

simonw wrote: post #15
gipp wrote: post #5

I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up. But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twen…

I'm not sure you're actually in disagreement with the author of this piece at all. They didn't say that software engineering is over - they said: > Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over. You argue that writing code is 10-20% of the craft. That's the point they are making too! They're framing the rest of it as the "talking", which is now even more important than it was before thanks to the wri…

> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.

Simon I guess vb-8558's comment inn here is something which is really nice (definitely worth a read) and they mention how much coding has changed from say 1995 to 2005 to 2015 to 2025

Directly copying line from their comment here : For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".

Recently Economic Media made a relevant video about all of this too: How Replacing Developers With AI is Going Horribly Wrong [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0nH_pSAdM]

My (point?) is that this pure mentality of code is cheap show me the talk is weird/net negative (even if I may talk more than I code) simply because code and coding practices are something that I can learn over my experience and hone in whereas talk itself constitutes to me as non engineers trying to create software and that's all great but not really understanding the limitations (that still exist)

So the point I am trying to make is that I feel as if when the OP mentioned code is 10-20% of the craft, they didn't mean the rest is talk. They meant all the rest are architectural decisions & just everything surrounding the code. Quite frankly, the idea behind Ai/LLM's is to automate that too and convert it into pure text and I feel like the average layman significantly overestimates what AI can and cannot do.

So the whole notion of show me the talk atleast in a more non engineering background as more people try might be net negative not really understanding the tech as is and quite frankly even engineers are having a hard time catching up with all which is happening.

I do feel like that the AI industry just has too many words floating right now. To be honest, I don't want to talk right now, let me use the tool and see how it goes and have a moment of silence. The whole industry is moving faster than the days till average js framework days.

To have a catchy end to my comment: There is just too much talk nowadays. Show me the trust.

I do feel like information has become saturated and we are transitioning from the "information" age to "trust" age. Human connections between businesses and elsewhere matter the most right now more than ever. I wish to support projects which are sustainable and fair driven by passion & then I might be okay with AI use case imo.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#33

Post by bryanlarsen »

vb-8448 wrote: post #19

> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over. I'm pretty sure the way I was doing things in 2005 was completely different compared to 2015. Same for 2015 and 2025. I'm not old enough to know how they were doing things in 1995, but I'm pretty sure there very different compared to 2005. For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".

1995 vs 2005 was definitely a larger change than subsequent decades; in 1995 most information was gathered through dead trees or reverse engineering.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#34

Post by Waterluvian »

I think if your job is to assemble a segment of a car based on a spec using provided tools and pre-trained processes, it makes sense if you worry that giant robot arms might be installed to replace you.

But if your job is to assemble a car in order to explore what modifications to make to the design, experiment with a single prototype, and determine how to program those robot arms, you’re probably not thinking about the risk of being automated.

I know a lot of counter arguments are a form of, “but AI is automating that second class of job!” But I just really haven’t seen that at all. What I have seen is a misclassification of the former as the latter.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#37

Post by xiaoape »

negamax wrote: post #13

I keep on wondering how much of the AI embrace is marketing driven. Yes, it can produce value and cut corners. But it seems like self driving by 2016 Musk prediction. Which never happened. With IPO/Stock valuations closely tied to hype, I wonder if we are all witnessing a giant bubble in the making How much of this is mass financial engineering than real value. Reading a lot of nudges how everyone should have Google…

Maybe we haven't seen much economic value or productivity increase given all the AI hypes. I don't think we can deny the fact that programming has been through a paradigm shift where humans aren't the only ones writing code and the amount of code written by humans I would say is decreasing.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#38

Post by raincole »

Talk is never cheap. Communicating your thoughts to people without the exact same kind of expertise as you is the most important skill.

This quote is from Torvalds, and I'm quite sure that if he weren't able to write eloquent English no one would know Linux today.

Code is important when it's the best medium to express the essence of your thoughts. Just like a composer cannot express the music in his head with English words.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#39

Post by lo_zamoyski »

negamax wrote: post #13

I keep on wondering how much of the AI embrace is marketing driven. Yes, it can produce value and cut corners. But it seems like self driving by 2016 Musk prediction. Which never happened. With IPO/Stock valuations closely tied to hype, I wonder if we are all witnessing a giant bubble in the making How much of this is mass financial engineering than real value. Reading a lot of nudges how everyone should have Google…

There's nothing to wonder about. It's obviously marketing.

The whole narrative of "inevitability" is the stock behavior of tech companies who want to push a product onto the public. Why fight the inevitable? All you can do is accept and adapt.

And given how many companies ask vendors whether their product "has AI" without having the slightest inkling of what that even means or whether it even makes sense, as if it were some kind of magical fairy dust - yeah, the stench of hype is thick enough you could cut it with a knife.

Of course, that doesn't mean it lacks all utility.

Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk

#40

Post by instig007 »

atomicnature wrote: post #26
leecommamichael wrote: post #14

> Ignoring outright bad code, in a world where functional code is so abundant that “good” and “bad” are indistinguishable, ultimately, what makes functional AI code slop or non-slop? I'm sorry, but this is an indicator for me that the author hasn't had a critical eye for quality in some time. There is massive overlap between "bad" and "functional." More than ever. The barrier-to-entry to programming got irresponsibly…

This is the "artisanal clothing argument". I'd think there'll be a dip in code quality (compared to human) initially due to "AI machinery" due to its immaturity. But over-time on a mass-scale - we are going to see an improvement in the quality of software artifacts. It is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality r…

> This is the "artisanal clothing argument".

> it is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality results.

Your take essentially is "let's live in a shoe box, packaging pipelines produce them cheaply en masse, who needs slow poke construction engineers and architects anymore"

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