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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#181

Post by danny_codes »

tigerlily wrote: post #41

There's a commercial building under construction next to my office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping young men are digging with their big excavators they've been using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer. Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.

I think OP is coming at this more from an artisan angle. Perhaps there were shoveler artisans who took pride in the angle of their dirt-shoveling. Those people perhaps do lament the advent of excavators. But presumably the population who find code beautiful vs the art of shoveling are of different sizes

Re: We mourn our craft

#182

Post by pron »

apitman wrote: post #175
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…

No doubt, I'm just saying that working with a coding agent is not even remotely similar to being a team lead. If a member of your team can't complete a task and can't accurately explain what the difficulty is, you're in trouble.

Re: We mourn our craft

#183

Post by apitman »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #141

If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera

But you have to admit it loses a certain shine in the cases where you know that what you're doing is no longer solving a problem that could be solved simpler and cheaper another way.

Re: We mourn our craft

#184

Post by crazygringo »

nubg wrote: post #151

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to findin…

I'm all for AI programming.

But I've seen this conversation on HN already 100 times.

The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not.

I personally don't agree at all, in the sense I don't think that matters. I've run into compiler bugs, and more library bugs than I can count. The real world is just as messy as LLMs are, and you still need the same testing strategies to guard against errors. Development is always a slightly stochastic process of writing stuff that you eventually get to work on your machine, and then fixing all the bugs that get revealed once it starts running on other people's machines in the wild. LLMs don't write perfect code, and neither do you. Both require iteration and testing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#185

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fastasucan wrote: post #63
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.

It is a different kind of code. Just a lot of programmers can’t grock it as such.

I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level. Now I’m doing both with AI and it’s a lot of fun. It is just programming at a higher level.

Re: We mourn our craft

#186

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sprice wrote: post #5

> I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production. This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and read and listen to.

Do you mean the perspective that he is a "glorified TSA agent" or that he doesn't like it? Because in this thread it seems that some people agree but they just like it :)

Re: We mourn our craft

#187

Post by daedrdev »

I feel like we are long into the twilight of mini blogs and personal sites. Its like people trying to protect automotive jobs, the vas majority were already lost

Perhaps Im a cynic but I don't know

Re: We mourn our craft

#188

Post by namuol »

The death of a means to an end is the birth of an end itself.

When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of programming/computing is going to be interesting.

Re: We mourn our craft

#189

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

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 want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.

Re: We mourn our craft

#190

Post by tatjam »

crazygringo wrote: post #154
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.

No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks. Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.

Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
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