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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#171

Post by koiueo »

> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.

I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me.

We'll still be sitting till 2am.

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

I've been hearing this for the last two years. And yet, LLMs, given abstract description of the problem, still write worse code than I do.

Or did you mean type code? Because in that case, yes, I'd agree. They type better.

Re: We mourn our craft

#172

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

I don't mourn coding for itself, since I've always kinda disliked that side of my work (numerical software, largely).

What I do mourn is the reliability. We're in this weird limbo where it's like rolling a die for every piece of work. If it comes up 1-5, I would have been better off implementing it myself. If it comes up 6, it'll get it done orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Since the overall speedup is worthwhile, I have to try it every time, even if most of the time it fails. And of course it's a moving target, so I have to keep trying the things that failed yesterday because today's models are more capable.

Re: We mourn our craft

#174

Post by mikepurvis »

altmanaltman wrote: post #76
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…

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 craf…

Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like:

- infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y.

- porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17.

- tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python.

- fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible

- fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here?

In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.

Re: We mourn our craft

#175

Post by apitman »

pron wrote: post #145

Some people say that working with an agent or an agents orchestrator is like being a technical lead. But I've been a technical lead for quite a while, and the experience of working with an agent doesn't even come close. I think that when people talk about the agents' coding abilities they're talking about the average ability. But as a team lead, I don't care about average ability. I care only about the worst case. If…

> If I have any doubt that someone might not complete a task, or at least accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with at least 95% certainty, I won't assign them the task

It gets hard to compare AI to humans. You can ask the AI to do things you would never ask a human to do, like retry 1000 times until it works, or assign 20 agents to the same problem with slightly different prompts. Or re-do the entire thing with different aesthetics.

Re: We mourn our craft

#176

Post by RivieraKid »

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…

> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.

Re: We mourn our craft

#177

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dgacmu wrote: post #86
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852): > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comme…

Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).

I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2...), and it returned:

> Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses

with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates.

---

Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually.

"Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus.

https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists:

> useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […]

Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile".

Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct.

By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.

Re: We mourn our craft

#178

Post by bojan »

heliumtera wrote: post #117
arduanika wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No true programmer is excited for the future.

this is so true. never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars

As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years. I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.

Re: We mourn our craft

#180

Post by zeroonetwothree »

_zagj wrote: post #149
faccacta wrote: post #37

I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.

At least with physical works (for now, anyway), the methods the artisans employ leave tell-tale signs attesting to the manner of construction, so that someone at least has the choice of going the "hand made" route, and others, even lay people without special tooling, can tell that it indeed was hand made.

Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. Of course it doesn't really matter for the business goals, as long as it works correctly. Just like 99% of people don't care if their clothing was machine made vs. handmade. It's going to be a tiny minority that care about handmade software.
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