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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#91

Post by XenophileJKO »

wlindley wrote: post #40
Banditoz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.

And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.

Re: We mourn our craft

#92

Post by 12_throw_away »

lp4v4n wrote: post #11

People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming. If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language. But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all. So here we're seeing yet another text about…

> we have formal languages for a reason

Right? At least on HN, there's a critical mass of people loudly ignoring this these days, but no one has explained to me how replacing formal language with an english-language-specialized chatbot - or even multiple independent chatbots (aka "an agent") - is good tradeoff to make.

Re: We mourn our craft

#93

Post by Ronsenshi »

Agree with the author. I like the process of writing code, typing method names and class definitions while at the same time thinking ahead about overall architecture, structure, how much time given function would run for, what kind of tests are necessary.

I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into this field for seemingly very different reasons.

I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I usually have when working on codebase myself.

Re: We mourn our craft

#94

Post by Fraterkes »

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…

I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting.

Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative.

Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?

Re: We mourn our craft

#95

Post by lukekim »

Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully automated production.

The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job.

This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (overseeing farm automation, high end handmade furniture, small organic farms), and the factory worker masses (ZIRP enabled tech workers) will move on to more fulfulling work.

Re: We mourn our craft

#96

Post by croes »

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…

But you don’t make.

You order it.

Re: We mourn our craft

#97

Post by karmasimida »

> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me.

I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.

Re: We mourn our craft

#98

Post by croes »

bnchrch wrote: post #24
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…

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

Re: We mourn our craft

#99

Post by killerstorm »

I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies.

Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching

Re: We mourn our craft

#100

Post by Eridrus »

I do not mourn typing in code.

But I am still quite annoyed at the slopful nature of the code that is produced when you're not constantly nagging it to do better

We've RLed it to produce code that works by hook or by crook, putting infinity fallback paths and type casts everywhere rather than checking what the semantics should be.

Sadly I don't know how we RL taste.

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