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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

71–80 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#71

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…

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Re: We mourn our craft

#72
Some code is worth transcribing by hand — an ancient practice in writing, art and music.[0] Some isn't even worth looking at.

I find myself, ironically, spending more time typing out great code by hand now. Maybe some energy previously consumed by tedium has been freed up, or maybe the wacky machines brought a bit of the whimsy back into the process for me.

[0] And in programming, for the readers of Zed Shaw's books :)

Re: We mourn our craft

#73

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…

AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.

Re: We mourn our craft

#74
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.

Re: We mourn our craft

#75
post #42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?

I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable! Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was…

Yes but did you learn anything?

Re: We mourn our craft

#76

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…

So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process.

It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!"

I mean sure yeah but also not really.

Re: We mourn our craft

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.

Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#78

dude needs to chill also: > We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. no we won't lol wtf but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time

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Re: We mourn our craft

#79
it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out there.

fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility.

a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a digital archive-brain.

Re: We mourn our craft

#80

This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things: Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doin…

“Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and it’s gone.”

I’m putting that on my wall.

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