Another post saying 6 more months.. i’m so tired of these
We mourn our craft
231–240 of 918 posts
Re: We mourn our craft
#232Quick questionnaire. Please reply with how much you like/use AI and what kind of programming you do.
I wonder if there are some interesting groupings.
Re: We mourn our craft
#233I 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…
Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.
Re: We mourn our craft
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a problem".
Re: We mourn our craft
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.
Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or status not because they like the process. Which is not an issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting exhausting.
> many went into this field for money
I went into this field for both! what do i do now, i'm screwed
Re: We mourn our craft
#236People 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.
It's "good" from the standpoint of business achieving their objectives more quickly. That may not be what we think of as objectively good in some higher sense, but it's what matters most in terms of what actually happens in the world.
Re: We mourn our craft
#237To 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…
Even if you are not coding in assembly you still need to think. Replace llm with a smart programmer. I don't like the other guy to do all the thinking for me. Much better if it's a collaborative process even if the other guy could have coded the perfect solution without my help. Like otherwise why am I even in the picture?
Re: We mourn our craft
#238I 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 can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all.
We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.
Re: We mourn our craft
#239While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
For me it's because the same tech is doing it to everyone else in a more effective way (i.e. artists especially). I'm an "art enjoyer" since I was a child and to see it decimated by people who I once looked up to is heartbreaking. Also, if it only affected software, I would've been happy to switch to a more artistic career, but welp there goes that plan.
I feel very similarly, I always thought of software engineering as being my future career. I'm young, I just really got my foot into the industry in my early twenties. It feels like the thing I wanted to do died right when I was allowed to start. I also always felt that if I didn't get to do development, I would try to get into arts which has always been a dream of mine, and now it feels that that died, too. I wish I was born just a little bit earlier, so that I had a bit more time. :(
Re: We mourn our craft
#240I suspect my comment will not be well received, however I notice in myself that I've passed the event horizon of being a believer and am past the honeymoon period and I'm beginning to think about engineering
My headspace is now firmly in "great, I'm beginning to understand the properties and affordances of this new medium, how do I maximise my value from it", hopefully there's more than a few people who share this perspective, I'd love to talk with you about the challenges you experience, I know I have mine, maybe we have answers to each others problems :)
I assume that the current set of properties can change, however it seems like some things are going to be easier than others, for example multi modal reasoning still seems to be a challenge and I'm trying to work out if that's just hard to solve and will take a while or if we're not far from a good solution