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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#61

Post by uejfiweun »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

I agree with you with the caveat that all the "ease of building" benefits, for me, could potentially be dwarfed by job losses and pay decreases. If SWE really becomes obsolete, or even if the number of roles decrease a lot and/or the pay decreases a lot (or even fails to increase with inflation), I am suddenly in the unenviable position of not being financially secure and being stuck in my 30s with an increasingly useless degree. A life disaster, in other words. In that scenario the unhappiness of worrying about money and retraining far outweighs the happiness I get from being able to build stuff really fast.

Fundamentally this is the only point I really have on the 'anti-AI' side, but it's a really important one.

Re: We mourn our craft

#62

Post by paulhebert »

ai_critic wrote: post #25

> We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. Oh come on . 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.

For what it’s worth I’ve followed the author for a long time and that does not describe the type of work he has done

Re: We mourn our craft

#63

Post by fastasucan »

iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

>It was, for me, never about the code.

Then it wasn't your craft.

Re: We mourn our craft

#64

Post by [deleted] »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#65

Post by terminalbraid »

thor-rodrigues wrote: post #34

I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing. Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it. What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-pa…

> All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing.

Except the community of people who, for whatever reason, had to throw themselves into it and had critical mass to both distribute and benefit from the passion of it. This has already been eroded by the tech industry coopting programming in general and is only going to diminish.

The people who discovered something because they were forced to do some hard work and then ran with it are going to be steered away from that direction by many.

Re: We mourn our craft

#66

Post by tock »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #55
Levitating wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop o…

It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor So what is stopping you other than yourself?

Billions of dollars?

Re: We mourn our craft

#67

Post by _zagj »

I'm surprised so many people are only waking up to this now. It should have been obvious as soon as ChatGPT came out that even with only incremental improvements, LLMs would kill programming as we knew it. And the fact that these utterances, however performative, from developers expressing grief or existential despair have become commonplace tells me as much about the power of these systems than whatever demo Anthropic or OpenAI has cooked up.

I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts, still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of software development becomes something akin to googling--just typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at least, we don't pay them very much.

Re: We mourn our craft

#68

Post by jmclnx »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is.

But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better,

I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it.

Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will really change.

Re: We mourn our craft

#70

Post by dismalaf »

Dunno, LLMs writing code still feels like they memorized a bunch of open source code and vomited them out in worse condition.

It's not that impressive that Claude wrote a C compiler when GitHub has the code to a bunch of C compilers (some SOTA) just sitting there.

I'm using an LLM to write a compiler in my spare time (for fun) for a "new" language. It feels more like a magical search engine than coding assistant. It's great for bouncing ideas from, for searching the internet without the clutter of SEO optimized sites and ads, it's definitely been useful, just not that useful for code.

Like, I have used some generated code in a very low stakes project (my own Quickshell components) and while it kind of worked, eventually I refactored it myself into 1/3 of the lines it produced and had to squash some bugs.

It's probably good enough for the people who were gluing React components together but it still isn't on the level where I'd put any code it produces into production anywhere I care about.

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