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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#301

Post by cheema33 »

stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

> an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition...

Nobody credible is promising you a perfect future. But, a better future, yes! If you do not see it, then know this. You have your head firmly planted in the sand and are intentionally refusing to see what is coming. You may not like it. You may not want it. But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or become irrelevant.

Does Copilot spit out useless PR comments. 100% yes! Are there tools that are better than Copilot? 100% yes! These tools are not perfect. But even with their imperfections, they are very useful. You have to learn to harness them for their strengths and build processes to address their weaknesses. And yes, all of this requires learning and experimentation. Without that, you will not get good results and you will complain about these tools not being good.

Re: We mourn our craft

#302

Post by senordevnyc »

arduanika wrote: post #197
boxedemp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge

Yes, that was the reference! Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.

Haha, I downvoted you from the first category (until I read this comment).

Re: We mourn our craft

#303

Post by onion2k »

stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

This feels right when you're looking forwards. The perfect AI bot is definitely not 6 months away. It'll take a lot longer than that to get something that doesn't get things wrong a lot of the time. That's not especially interesting or challenging though. It's obvious.

What's much more interesting is looking back 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. 6 months ago was ChatGPT 5, 12 months ago was GPT 4.5, 18 months ago was 4o, and 24 months ago ChatGPT 3.5 was released (the first one). If you've been following closely you'll have seen incredible changes between each of them. Not to get to perfect, because that's not really a reasonable goal, but definite big leaps forward each time. A couple of years ago one-shotting a basic tic tac toe wasn't really possible. Now though, you can one-shot a fairly complex web app. It won't be perfect, or even good by a lot of measures compared to human written software, but it will work.

I think the comparison to the internet is a good one. I wrote my first website in 1997, and saw the rapid iteration of websites and browsers back then. It felt amazing, and fast. AI feels the same to me. But given the fact that browsers still aren't good in a lot of ways I think it's fair to say AI will take a similarly long time. That doesn't mean the innovations along the way aren't freaking cool though.

Re: We mourn our craft

#304

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.

Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.

This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.

Re: We mourn our craft

#305

Post by Kiro »

grahar64 wrote: post #7

"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.

Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.

Re: We mourn our craft

#307

Post by fullstackchris »

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.

so much garbage ego in statements like this. if you really knew about software, you'd recognize there are about a million ways to be successful in this field

Re: We mourn our craft

#308

Post by geetee »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #226
apitman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously that matters, but how much does it matter? Does it matter if you don't learn anything about computer architecture because you only code in JS all day? Very situational.

There's a subset of people whose identity is grounded in the fact that they put in the hard work to learn things that most people are unable or unwilling to do. It's a badge of honor, and they resent anyone taking "shortcuts" to achieve their level of output. Kind of reminds me of lawyers who get bent out of shape when they lose a case to a pro se party. All those years of law school and studying for the bar exam, on…

It's not that our identity is grounded in being competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes left by people taking shortcuts.

Re: We mourn our craft

#309

Post by chongli »

stevejb wrote: post #110
fastasucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?

I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.

Re: We mourn our craft

#310

Post by thwarted »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #222
thwarted wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this. Personally, I am not stym…

> Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". For sure. I idealize a future where people can spend more time doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream. The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal. Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces th…

And not just the definition, but the assumption that a specific toil is necessarily universal. I've had more than one conversation that started with someone else saying "using the LLM saves me soooo much time typing, think of how much time typing you'd save by using an LLM". But when I examine my processes and where I'm spending my time, typing isn't even on my list, so this claim is talking right past me and I can't see it all. Even when I was a hunt-and-peck typer on the c64 I didn't consider the typing to be a/the major factor in how long something took to program so much so that I continued with two-finger typing until I was forced to take a touch-typing class in highschool (back when that was still a thing, and we split the exercises between typewriters and computers).

"I'm able to put my shirt on so much faster with this shirt-buttoning machine, and I don't spend time tediously buttoning shirts and maybe having to rebutton when I misalign the buttons and buttonholes. You should get one to button your shirts, you're wasting time by not using a buttoning machine".

"I wear t-shirts."

(Obviously a contrived and simplistic example for fun)

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